Problems - transferring pictures from an Android smartphone to a computer for video inclusion

[Davidk]

This is possibly a bit out of the normal issue for VS, but I can't think of another source of advice.
I have a smartphone running Android 11, that I use occasionally (there are several reasons why that is, but some times there isn't an option) to take images I plan to use in a video project. Copying the images to the win 10 desktop folder that VS will use should be straight forward BUT
- the phone connects as an external drive, tick
- the images folder opens - slowly, like 15-20 sec for explorer to scan it and display the contents (reason 1 to use a separate camera) that it feels like a week of wet sundays
- the images display fine in the files images app on the phone, but despite being listed as a JPG file, they simply won't open when selected in explorer (unsupported or corrupt file format) and I haven't found a way to fix that (reason 2 to use a separate camera)

Can anyone suggest why the desktop explorer response is so slow, and why the files won't open on another device?

[lata]

Hi David
I connected an old phone, android 8 to my pc, connected as an external drive, I did not have any problems moving/ copying images.
I then used Google Photos, never used that before but was able to upload to Google from phone and download to pc. Although I would prefer to use One Drive as I use that most weeks.

[Davidk]

Trevor,
I did not have a problem with this with my prior PC, so I'm theorising that it may be something in the new build or possibly just a settings problem. But it's driving me nuts.

[Ken Berry]

I once had this problem, though it eventually corrected itself -- and I don't know how! I never did anything with my computer setup or for that matter with that of the phone. It simply, one day, worked where before it had not. Mind you, I now have a new smartphone and no problem at all. But until it corrected itself, I found a workaround which is rather time consuming. In the phone I would go go into the gallery and select the images I wanted. Then I would share them to my email app and send them to myself. After that, with the images as attachments to a received email, I would simply download them, and both File Explorer and in this case PSP not VS, could accept and edit them. I imagine the same thing would have occurred with VS, however.

If you have lots of images, though, I would suggest you would have to break them down into more management groups. But as I said, this workaround takes a fair amount of time...

[Davidk]

I was sitting here, giving the machine my very best "what are you doing?" glare, when an old memory surfaced. I'd been using a brand-new usb-usbC cable 2 m long connecting the phone to the PC for the efforts I reported above. The old memory related to better signal performance of shorter cables. So I hunted out an older, shorter 1m cable and tried that. Voila! Suddenly, the folder opens quickly, and I can see contents of images without that file format failure message.
Maybe Ken fixed his issue by using a shorter cable too.

[Ken Berry]

My new Android phone now prompts me when I connect it to the computer, to choose between Charge, Transfer Files and Transfer Photos. I use a 1 metre USB-C cable yes. But with the old phone I am pretty sure I used to use a 2 metre mini USB cable. Mind you, I have so many mini USB cables that I am now not totally sure which one I used... And it is getting that way pretty fast with my collection of varying length USB-C cables these days...

[Davidk]

There are standards for various types of computer cables, esp so for usb versions intended to send/receive fast signals. But just used to battery charge (DC) the phone this extra length would not matter. So this flummoxed me for a while. But a 2 m cable has twice the signal loss as a 1 m cable, so in retrospect it seems entirely feasible that the phone levels are just good enough for a 1 m cable but 2m is a stretch too far. And thus the waiting, waiting, corrupt file message etc that I got. An even shorter cable would probably do even better.

[zaphodikus]

I have also had VS be unhappy with photos copied off of a phone, and resorted to email. I'm wondering if the phone decided to re-encode the photos in a weird way, but I also never got to the cause. It was a long while back, it was when I had a Sammy S7. So not just you David.
It is often so slow, I'm now resorting to using a cloud drive and manually choosing which pics I sync from the phone in the gallery so that I don't have to fight with the slow USB speed to just browse to the photos - until the cloud starts to cost too much, that does seem to work.