Microsoft Releases 'Photos Companion' iOS App for Quickly Transferring Photos to PC

I am helping a senior citizen move from a Windows 10 laptop to an iPad Pro because the laptop is too heavy and his android phone is a nightmare.
I was wondering what was the best way to transfer photos either way. I thought of using Dropbox cloud app but they will already have a 200GB iCloud account for backups. Didn't want to install iTunes bloat just for photos. Now this appears, might be the best solution without having to install iTunes.

There is an iOS Dropbox app. You could shovel the images into Dropbox on the PC, retrieve them from Dropbox on the iPad, and import them into Photos.
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Living in hope that one day there will be an easy way to transfer photos out of multiple iCloud accounts onto my Mac Mini.

My Mini is my main photo store. Getting pictures from both my wife and my phones (different iCloud accounts) onto it is just painstaking and horrid.

If you and your wife both have accounts on the Mini, and are both signed into your iCloud accounts on that Mini, and are both logged into the Mini, then your iCloud photos should automatically sync to the Mini in your separate user directories.

What you do from there depends upon what you want: if you want a single, merged collection in one instance of Photos, a little bit of command-line hackery will get you there:

mkdir ~/Downloads/wife_photos
sudo rsync -avH --progress ~wifes_account_name/Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary/Masters/* \
~/Downloads/wife_photos/

Now you can open your instance of Photos and slurp in everything that's new since the last time you did it. It's not automatic and ideal, but it should get the job done (though you will not have any metadata other than the EXIF data in the images themselves). This method will also preserve the dates on the images.

Apple needs to make it easy to move your photos *in their albums* to you computer. Sometimes you want to see them not on a tiny screen.

Apple already has a perfectly good and free solution in My Photo Stream (not the premium iCloud Photo Library service). Just take a photo on your iPhone and it's there on your PC within a couple second. I believe you need to install iCloud plugin on your PC to get this to work on Windows. With a Mac, it's an automatic process if you use the same iCloud account on both devices.

Perfectly good? No, no it's not.

I got sick of having to engage senior level support, including handing them my login info for them to test in their lab, to get iCloud for Windows to work.

I broke down and bought a Mac Mini just to ensure seamless backup of my photos and videos.

Senior level support? All you have to do is use Google Photos, OneDrive, or DropBox and they'll upload your photos up into the cloud for backup. Or transfer all of your photos from your phone to your computer, then use something like CrashPlan to backup your entire computer. Definitely didn't require getting a Mac Mini.

Living in hope that one day there will be an easy way to transfer photos out of multiple iCloud accounts onto my Mac Mini.

My Mini is my main photo store. Getting pictures from both my wife and my phones (different iCloud accounts) onto it is just painstaking and horrid.

Why has this never been an easy process? And no - Image Capture is not streamlined for photo transfer from iPhone.

Edit - I see this is about Windows. But Apple

Apple needs to make it easy to move your photos *in their albums* to you computer. Sometimes you want to see them not on a tiny screen.

I am helping a senior citizen move from a Windows 10 laptop to an iPad Pro because the laptop is too heavy and his android phone is a nightmare.
I was wondering what was the best way to transfer photos either way. I thought of using Dropbox cloud app but they will already have a 200GB iCloud account for backups. Didn't want to install iTunes bloat just for photos. Now this appears, might be the best solution without having to install iTunes.

Another option is PhotoSync. I've used it across Windows, iOS, and Android.

Why has this never been an easy process? And no - Image Capture is not streamlined for photo transfer from iPhone.

WTF are you on about? This article is about iPhone to Windows which is a pain. This is NOT about iPhone to macOS.

Photos and Image Capture are excellent and DO streamline photo transfer. Again, I have no clue wtf you're referring to. Also, Air Drop is a marvel as well.

Apple already has a perfectly good and free solution in My Photo Stream (not the premium iCloud Photo Library service). Just take a photo on your iPhone and it's there on your PC within a couple second. I believe you need to install iCloud plugin on your PC to get this to work on Windows. With a Mac, it's an automatic process if you use the same iCloud account on both devices.

Perfectly good? No, no it's not.

I got sick of having to engage senior level support, including handing them my login info for them to test in their lab, to get iCloud for Windows to work.

I broke down and bought a Mac Mini just to ensure seamless backup of my photos and videos.

Apple already has a perfectly good and free solution in My Photo Stream (not the premium iCloud Photo Library service). Just take a photo on your iPhone and it's there on your PC within a couple second. I believe you need to install iCloud plugin on your PC to get this to work on Windows. With a Mac, it's an automatic process if you use the same iCloud account on both devices.

I’m actually surprised at how well iCloud Photo Library works on Windows. And it has an upload folder so you can move photos from Windows to your Apple devices.