Photos and Videos won't copy to sandisk iXpand

I just received my iXpand drive today and when I attempted to transfer all 212 files (photos and videos taken with iPhone 6 camera), only 12 files were successfully copied. Can anybody explain why the other 200 files wouldn’t copy and if this is fixable?

Thank you  

Do you have iCloud photo library enabled? If so there can sometimes be an issue with connecting to iCloud which can cause transfer failures. If you see All photos when you access the native photos app iCloud photo library is enabled. A couple of things you can try

  1. Ensure you have a valid internet connection. If you are using WiFi try LTE and if you are using LTE try wifi

  2. Try turning off iCloud photo library and attempt to re-transfer the files. See if you see the same failed message

Thanks for your reply. iCloud Photo Library is enabled so I disabled it and received the prompt:

‘Do you want to download a copy of your iCloud Photo Library to this iPhone?.  Photos and video that have not been fully downloaded will be removed from this iPhone. These items will still be available on other devices using iCloud Photo Library.’

and the choice to ‘Remove from iPhone’ or ‘Download Photos & Videos’

I assume I should choose ‘Download Photos & Videos’?

so it looks like all 212 photos and videos are not stored locally on your phone and the iXpand app is having and issue connecting to iCloud to get the vids and pics. Since you could get 12 photos that is likely what is stored locally and the other 200 are on a different device and icloud. 

You can try downloading them if you have enough free space for them on your phone. If not, do you know what device the other 212 pics and vids are on? if you turn off icloud photo library they should still be available on that device. Also you can log into iCloud and they should be available there.

So I logged into iCloud and they all seem to be there. Does this mean that they can’t be transferred from my phone to the sandisk iXpand?

Turning iCloud Photo Library off means I need to download them to my phone, which I can’t because there’s no space left on my phone and is why I bought the sandisk iXpand in the first place, and the other option ‘Remove from iPhone’ doesn’t make sense either because then there would be nothing to transfer. I took all these photos and videos with my phone so they’re not on any other device.

I apologize if I’m being dense here.

if they are all on iCloud you would not have to download them to your phone. Turning off iCloud photo library would only break the connection with iCloud so the pictures would not be available on your phone but would still be on iCloud. 

the issue I think you are having here is that the iXpand app cannot get the remaining 200 pics from icloud for some reason. Possibly some permissions issue or maybe something else. but to try to determine what exactly is the issue we need to turn iCloud photo library off and see how may pictures and video are actually on your phone and see if all those transfer without issue. If they do then the issue is definitely something with connecting to iCloud. 

on a side note if the phone does in fact only have 12 pics on it like it seems then using the iXpand is not going to free up much space. 12 pictures would only free maybe 50 or so MB. unless you have a long video on it as well then it could free up more. 

So I turned off iCloud Photo Library and, like you predicted, there’s next to nothing actually on my phone. It’s all in the cloud.

Can you think of any way to get these photos and videos from iCloud onto the SanDisk drive? Have you encountered this issue before?

Many thanks for all your help

you could use a computer and log into iCloud and copy them to the iXpand drive. Not sure why the app is having trouble connecting with iCloud but you could try

  1. make sure you have a valid Internet connection. Wifi connected preferably but if it is failing on wifi try LTE.

  2. check the iCloud settings and make sure you are signed in and see if there may be some permissions issue. 

You can also open a support ticket with sandisk support and submit the app logs. You would need to turn on iCloud photo sharing and then try to transfer all the files. Once you see the failures and after the transfer attempt has finished in the iXpand drive app select view files. pull down on the file list and in the search bar type “sandisklogs” and then tap search. This will open your default email client with the logs attached. You can email those to sandisk support and they can review them and see if they can find the root cause the app can’t connect with your iCloud account. 

I find a solution to copy uncopy pictures from iXpand drive application. Try to copy directly your uncopy pictures from your usual photo application by a send to iXpend that you allowed in photo parameters - this solution seems to be ok with all the files and also uncopy video - if it is ok also for your as for me this prove that there are bugs to be corrected in iXpand drive application …