The issue of not being able to import large video files, recorded by your iPhone, to your computer (via iPhoto or Image Capture), experienced by hundreds of iPhone users lately, has been a frustrating one. Google-searching for solutions, most people suggest restarting your iPhone, and if that doesn’t help, restoring your iPhone’s settings. However, in many cases that just won’t do and besides, rebooting the phone everytime takes a lot of time and patience. Finally, after some browsing through the forums, I found a simple and elegant solution that always works, suggested by Peter:
1. Connect your iPhone to the computer and start Itunes.
2. Start Sync if it hasn’t started automatically.
3. After the sync is done, find your Backup folder:
> Mac users – Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup
> Windows users – C:Documents and SettingsApplication DataApple ComputerMobileSyncBackup
4. In the backup folder you’ll normally find a few different versions of your phone’s backup, none of them resemble any data you’d normally expect.
5. Select the first folder by alphabet. Then, sort all the inside files by size. This way you’ll quickly locate the video files, which will normally be those of largest size.
6. Drag those files into a new location, f.e. your Desktop, and rename each of them to whatever you like, only making sure to add the .mov extension at the end (e.g. movie1.mov). There you have it – it’s not a perfect solution but until Apple finds a way to fix this bug, it’s about the only thing we can do!
I hope you find this blog post useful. Also, don’t hesitate to write a comment of how you deal with this issue.