How to transfer photos from an iPhone directly to a Flash Drive

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The storage space on the iPhones, as Google hilariously pointed out in a commercial for Google Photos, is excruciatingly limited. At the same time, a single photo on the iPhone takes up a lot more space as compared to other smartphones. Apple's iCloud services too are quite expensive for an average iPhone-user to afford. And even though you can backup your photos through iTunes on a Mac or a Windows PC, it's not always that we have access to our PCs when we are running out of storage and desperate to free up a few gigabytes.

Android users have it easy. First, they get a good 100GB storage space with their Google Drive account. And then, Android phones come with USB On-The-Go support that allows Android phones to be compatible with most plug-and-play USB devices including a mouse, keyboard and most importantly, a flash drive or an external hard disk.


1. If you happen to have an iPhone and you naturally happen to click a lot of photos on it which eats up all the space, there is a solution for your woes.

2. All you need is an USB thumb drive with a Lightning connector to transfer the photos directly to the flash drive from your iPhone's Camera Roll.

3. The Sandisk iXpand flash drive is the perfect fit for the job. It comes with in 16GB, 32GB, 64GB and 128GB variants and has an additional Lightning connector along with the standard USB port to connect to a PC. The 16GB variant comes for Rs 2,598 on Amazon India and goes all the way up to Rs 7,480 for the 128GB variant.

4. For short term storage, long enough for you to transfer them to your PC when you have the time, the 16GB variant will work.

5. The flash drive comes with the Sandisk iXpand sync app for iOS that will sync your Camera Roll with the thumb drive, so that the moment you plug in the flash drive, your iPhone will automatically start to backup all the photos and videos.

6. What's more, if you happen to be a privacy freak, you can encrypt the photos that you backup on the flash drive with a flash drive which can then be unlocked either using the password or TouchID.