How to get photos out of a windows phone 7 device as a Mac user?

1

I just got a new Nokia Lumia 800 with wp7 mango. Overall the device and os look and feel pretty good but there is one major problem: I can't transfer the pictures I've taken with it to my mac.

I've tried the Windows Phone 7 connector for mac and it totally halts my Lion every time I connect the phone. Only way to get out of the freeze is to restart OSX. A bit of googling reveals that a lot of people have problems with wp7 connector and Lion.

Overall, I don't like the concept of the wp7 connector either. I should just be able to transfer the photos without starting both iTunes and wp7 connector like I can with android phones.

Of course, the phone can't just work as a usb mass storage device. I also can't browse files via bluetooth which I suspect is by design.

There are iDisk and similar cloud sharing possibilities but I suspect that the quality of the pictures suffers. Also it's a pain in the ass to transfer all photos via a web ui.

So is there something obvious I've missed here?

auramo

Posted 2012-01-06T09:31:39.613

Reputation: 963

First of all - WP Connector should work fine on Lion. If it doesn't, contact MS support, they should help for free in this case. Meanwhile, most logical would be to upload photos to a SkydDrive, and then download them as one archive. This solves the problem of downloading it one by one. Then you just wait for WP Connector to get update, which is most likely to solve the problem with iTunes transfer. Unfortunately on Windows you also just need to have Zune running to copy pictures. Not other obvious way, and I doubt there will be any in a near future. – Maxim V. Pavlov – 2012-01-06T09:49:06.510

Answers

1

Although I'm not a WP7 user myself, I can only think of one solution offhand which I use for Android:

Are you unable to browse files via Bluetooth on the Windows Phone side or the Mac side, or both?

Another thing I do on the Android side is to use a simple FTP server to transfer the files wirelessly over the local Wi Fi network. Based on a cursory Google search, however, your FTP options look rather limited. It looks like there are no quick and dirty FTP servers available for WP7, so you'll have to download an FTP client for Windows Phone 7 and set up a small FTP server on your Mac.

Additional Google searches point to just enabling the native FTP Server within Lion, then using the WP7 FTP client to transfer it over to the Mac, but setup for it looks rather clunky and a bit CLI-oriented (looks like you might have to add user groups or something?); apparently they removed the GUI for the FTP server in Lion. Another suggestion I'm getting from Google searches is PureFTPd and the accompanying PureFTPd Manager as a Cocoa frontend.

It sounds like a lot of work, but if this WP7 "connector" isn't cutting it (what happened to just using standard mini-USB cables?) this might be your best bet.

White Phoenix

Posted 2012-01-06T09:31:39.613

Reputation: 1 271

Asked: 2012-01-06T09:31:39.613

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Active: 2017-01-09T11:23:25.110