How to Transfer Photos from iPhone to Android (2026)

If you want to know how to transfer photos from iPhone to Android, you have four real routes: send them through a cloud service like Google Photos, copy them off a computer with a USB cable, hand them over a wireless connection, or pull them down from iCloud. All four are free. The one you pick depends on how many photos you have and whether you have a computer nearby.

One thing to clear up first, because it trips up nearly everyone: you cannot AirDrop an iPhone photo to an Android phone. AirDrop is an Apple-to-Apple feature, and no Android phone speaks it. Apple’s own transfer flow only shows up when you are setting up a new Apple device, so if someone told you AirDrop was the easy button, they were describing the Apple-to-Apple case, not yours.

Everything below uses built-in Apple and Google tools. No paid software, no cables you do not own, no handing your photo library to an app maker you have never heard of.

What You Need

Start by checking two things: free space on the Android phone, and whether you are moving ten photos or ten thousand. That single number decides which method below saves you the most time.

A typical iPhone photo runs about 3 to 5 MB, and a short video can be 100 MB or more. So budget roughly 25 GB for 5,000 photos, and 50 GB or more for a 10,000-photo library. Check the Android phone first: Settings > Storage shows what is free. Run out of room mid-transfer and the copy stops, which is the single most common reason a transfer looks like it failed.

For the cloud route you need a Google account on both phones, and the free 15 GB of Google Photos storage. For the cable route you need a computer with a spare USB port and a cable that can do data, not just charge. For the wireless routes you need both phones on the same Wi-Fi network, or one of them creating a hotspot.

Before you move anything, make sure your iPhone photos are actually on the iPhone. If iCloud Photos is switched on, originals sync to Apple’s servers and live in both places, which is good for recovery but confusing when you count later. Open Photos > Settings on the iPhone and note which setting is active.

One optional setting worth changing: Settings > Photos > Transfer to Mac or PC. Leave it on Automatic and you get JPEG, which every Android gallery opens without fuss. Set it to Keep Originals and you get HEIC files, which are smaller but need a converter app on the Android side. Automatic is the smoother path for most people, and I talk through the HEIC problem later.

No downloads required for any of the four methods below. Google Photos is already installed on most Android phones, and the cable and iCloud routes use stock apps.

Step-by-Step

How to Transfer Photos with Google Photos

This is the method most people should try first. It needs no computer and no cable, and it works on an iPhone and an Android phone that are miles apart.

1. On the iPhone, install Google Photos from the App Store and sign in with a Google account.
2. Open the app and tap your profile picture in the top right, then tap Turn on backup.
3. Tap the gear icon for backup settings. Choose Original quality if you want every pixel and file size preserved, or Storage saver if you want smaller uploads. Storage saver compresses photos above 16 MP down to about 16 MP and re-encodes video at 1080p, so it is a real reduction, not a cosmetic one.
4. Leave the phone on a charger with Wi-Fi connected. Watch the progress bar under the photo grid; the backup is finished when the cloud icon stops spinning.
5. On the Android phone, open Google Photos and sign in with the same Google account. Every backed-up photo appears in the grid, though not in the device gallery.
6. To put copies on the Android phone itself, tap a photo, tap the three-dot menu, choose Download, or select several and use Save to device. Repeat in batches, because selecting 10,000 items at once tends to stall.

The catch everyone hits: free Google Photos storage is 15 GB, shared across photos, Gmail and Drive. Check your usage at photos.google.com/quotamanagement or in the app under Storage before you start. A 15 GB ceiling covers roughly 3,000 to 4,000 average photos, so a large library needs Google One or a different method.

Verification: open the Android Google Photos app, confirm the count at the top matches roughly what you had, and open two or three older photos to check the dates look right. Photos only appear in the Android gallery app once you download them, so if Gallery looks empty that is expected, not a failure.

How to Transfer Photos with a USB Cable

The cable route is the fastest for big libraries and the only one that works with no internet at all. It moves files directly between devices, so there is no cloud size cap and no compression unless you ask for it.

1. Plug the iPhone into the computer with a Lightning to USB-C cable. On the iPhone, tap Trust This Computer when the prompt appears. Skip this and the DCIM folder never shows up.
2. Open the iPhone drive in your file manager and find DCIM > 100APPLE. Some libraries also have an Originals folder, which holds Live Photos and edited versions.
3. Plug the Android phone into a second USB port. Swipe down the notification shade, tap the USB charging notification, and change the mode from Charging only to Transferring files (MTP). This is the step people miss, and nothing will show up in File Explorer without it.
4. Open the Android phone’s internal shared storage > DCIM > Camera folder. Copy the photos from 100APPLE into Camera and the gallery app will index them within a minute or two.
5. Disconnect both devices properly by ejecting the drives rather than yanking the cable.

On Windows, use File Explorer and look for This PC > Apple Mobile Device > Internal Storage > DCIM > 100APPLE. You can select the whole folder and drag it across in one go, which is far quicker than clicking file by file.

On a Mac with the Apple Devices app installed, open it, select your iPhone, and click the Files tab to reach the same DCIM folder. Older macOS versions without that app: connect the iPhone, open Finder, pick the iPhone in the sidebar, then go to Internal Storage > DCIM > 100APPLE. The iPhone also appears as a regular drive on the desktop, which makes the drag-and-drop even simpler.

One genuine decision here: if you copy 100APPLE contents into the Android DCIM/Camera folder, the photos live on the device and show up everywhere, including Google Photos later. If you paste them into a folder of your own making, Gallery may skip them because it only indexes specific directories. Use Camera.

On a Galaxy, Samsung’s own Smart Switch app can move photos, messages and apps in one pass during setup, and it handles Live Photos by exporting them as short MP4 clips with a matching still. It is worth using if you are setting up the phone fresh, because the transfer runs locally and it preserves more of the original structure than the manual copy does.

Transfer Photos with Nearby Share

Android’s wireless sharing works both ways now, which it did not for years. On a recent iPhone, AirDrop’s share sheet includes a nearby-device option that can hand a photo straight to an Android phone when the two are close together with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on. On Android, Quick Share sends to iPhone the same way.

To use Quick Share on the Android phone: open the photo, tap Share, then Quick Share. Your iPhone needs iOS 10 or later, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi switched on, and both devices within about 10 meters. The iPhone shows up as a named device in the list. If it does not appear, both phones usually need to be on the same Wi-Fi network, which is where most failures land.

For larger batches, two free web tools beat tapping through Quick Share forty times. Snapdrop works by opening snapdrop.com on both phones while they share a Wi-Fi network: every device on that network shows up in a list, you tap the other phone, and the files move locally. LocalSend does the same thing with an app installed on both sides instead of a browser tab, and it handles large batches better.

Both tools work with no internet at all. Turn on a hotspot on the Android phone, join the iPhone to it, and open Snapdrop on each device; that route sidesteps weak Wi-Fi entirely, which is what makes it fast in a shop or a hotel room.

Verification checklist before you move on: confirm the recipient got the file, open one image on the Android phone to check it is not a blurry thumbnail, and check the photo count in the gallery rather than trusting the progress bar. Wireless sends fail quietly far more often than cable copies do.

Transfer Photos from iCloud

If you already pay for iCloud and your photos live in iCloud Photos, you can pull them onto Android through a browser. No iCloud app for Android is required.

1. On the Android phone, open Chrome and go to iCloud.com.
2. Sign in with your Apple ID. If you have two-factor authentication on, the code goes to your trusted Apple devices, so keep the iPhone nearby for this step.
3. Tap Photos, then select the photos or an album, then tap the download icon in the bottom right.
4. The originals download to the phone’s Downloads folder. Move them into DCIM > Camera with the Files app so Gallery picks them up.

That route has real limits. iCloud.com only shows photos still synced to Apple’s servers, and it only shows photos that exist in your library at all, not ones sitting alone on a lost phone. Downloading a large batch at once can time out, so 100 to 200 at a time is the practical rhythm.

The warning that matters: do not sign out of iCloud on the iPhone until the transfer is verified. If iCloud Photos is your only copy and you sign out, Apple removes the originals from the device. Download from iCloud.com, count the photos on the Android phone, then sign out. That order protects you.

What Does Not Transfer

Some things cannot make the jump, and it is better to know now than to find out next year. Live Photos are the big one: they are a photo plus a three-second video, and Google Photos usually stores them as a still image with the motion stripped out. Copy via cable and the 100APPLE folder keeps the paired MP4, but only some Android gallery apps play them together. Snapdrop and LocalSend move both files intact, so they are your best bet for keeping Live Photos alive.

Shared albums do not come across. Anything another person posted to an iCloud Shared Album stays in that album, because you never owned those originals. Apple’s edits are another one: adjustments made in the iOS Photos app may not survive, since Android has no equivalent to Apple’s editing engine. Memories and Duplicate albums are Apple-side features with no Android counterpart.

Dates and locations mostly survive, which surprises people in a good way. EXIF metadata travels with the file through the cable route, Google Photos and the wireless tools. The exception is anything that goes through a messaging app, where WhatsApp and friends re-encode images and usually strip location data.

Common Mistakes

Photos arrive but will not open. That is almost always HEIC. Apple’s default format is HEIC/HEIF, and some Android gallery apps display a grey tile instead of the photo. Two fixes: on the iPhone, go to Settings > Photos > Transfer to Mac or PC > Automatically and re-transfer so you get JPEGs; or set Keep Originals and install a HEIF converter on the Android phone. Google Photos on the Android side converts and displays HEIC without help.

Photos are missing from the Gallery app. Files sitting in Downloads or a folder you made will not be indexed. Move them to internal shared storage > DCIM > Camera, then restart the phone so Gallery rescans. On Samsung, open Gallery, tap the three-dot menu, choose Settings and make sure Show images on internal storage is on.

Everything looks duplicated. This one confuses most people. In Google Photos, turn off Show on-device photos under Photos > Settings > Viewing options, or the same pictures show up from both the cloud and the phone’s storage. Related: photos you backed up but have not downloaded should not appear in Gallery, and that is normal.

Quality looks worse. Two usual causes. Storage saver on Google Photos caps photos at about 16 MP, and messaging apps compress hard. Switch to Original quality in Google Photos backup settings, or re-send through Snapdrop or the cable route, which do not touch the file.

The cable does nothing. Nine times out of ten the Android phone is in charging-only mode. Change the USB notification to Transferring files. On the iPhone side, tap Trust This Computer. If the iPhone drive never appears at all, try a different USB port, one on the back of a desktop rather than a hub.

The transfer stalls partway. Check free space on the Android phone first, then close any photo app that is indexing new files while you copy. Over Wi-Fi cloud transfers, a large library can take days, so leave the iPhone charging on a strong connection rather than assuming it has hung.

Not enough room on the Android phone. Free space first in Settings > Storage, and move large videos to the cloud once they have transferred. Every photo needs its own copy, so the Android phone needs roughly the same capacity as the iPhone library.

Before you erase anything from the iPhone, run this check: compare the photo count on both devices, open three older photos and confirm the dates are right, check one video plays from the start, and confirm your Google Photos backup or iCloud copy is still active. Only after all four does the iPhone get wiped.

Frequently Asked Questions

Start with Google Photos set to Original quality if your library fits under 15 GB, because it needs nothing plugged in and it leaves a backup behind on both phones. If the library is larger or you want the files physically on the Android device right now, use the cable route and copy 100APPLE into DCIM/Camera. Either way, count the photos and check a few dates before you let go of the iPhone.