All guides · 6 min read

Getting phone photos onto your PC – and organising them there

How to move photos from your phone to your computer without losing the capture date, and why duplicates are almost unavoidable along the way.

An average phone holds a few thousand pictures. Getting them onto the computer somehow is no longer a problem – every route works. The problem starts afterwards: you have a folder with 4,000 files called “IMG_2048.jpg”, and nobody knows which of them were already there.

The transfer route decides the date

This is the most important point, and almost every guide leaves it out. Every image file carries two timestamps: the capture date in the EXIF data and the file system’s date modified. Which route you pick decides whether the second one survives.

• USB cable and Explorer – the date modified is normally preserved
• Cloud folders such as OneDrive or Google Photos – usually preserved, depending on settings
• WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal – the date is set to the moment of arrival, and the image is downsized as well
• Email to yourself – the date is set anew

If you intend to sort by year and month later, this is not a detail but the whole question. Images fetched through a messenger all land in the month they arrived – all 4,000 of them in the same folder.

Cable beats cloud

For a one-off bulk import the cable is the best route: fast, lossless and with no third-party server in between.

1. Plug the phone in and allow “File transfer” on the phone – without that confirmation you only get charging.
2. In Explorer, open the phone under “This PC”, then “Internal storage” and “DCIM” inside it.
3. Copy the “Camera” or “100ANDRO” folders to the computer – copy, do not move.
4. Only once everything has arrived and you have spot-checked a few files, delete them on the phone.

This PC\My Phone\Internal storage\DCIM\Camera

Why duplicates are unavoidable here

The phone does not know what you have already copied. Next time you copy everything again – or you copy only the new part and are not quite sure whether you skipped something. Both lead to the same result: after three imports, some of the pictures sit on the disk several times over.

That is not an avoidable mistake, it is the normal case. The only reliable answer is to look for duplicates afterwards – by content, not by name. “IMG_2048.jpg” and “IMG_2048 (1).jpg” are often the same image, but “IMG_2048.jpg” from two different months are two completely different images that happen to share a name.

Screenshots are not photos

The camera roll holds far more than photographs. Screenshots, forwarded images, downloaded instructions and receipts mix in with the holiday pictures and inflate any sorting scheme.

Android already keeps much of this apart – “Screenshots”, “WhatsApp Images” and “Download” are folders of their own next to “Camera”. It pays to leave those out of the import at first and fetch only the camera roll. Whatever you really want to keep from the rest, you can collect later on purpose.

Organising by year and month

For images, sorting by time has proven itself, because with photos you remember the time rather than the file type. Two levels are enough:

2026\03 March\IMG_2048_2026-03-14.jpg

With Zortio

Zortio can do both in one pass: file everything by year and month while picking out the duplicates from your repeated imports. The comparison is byte for byte, not by name – so two identical images are recognised even when one is called “IMG_2048.jpg” and the other “Sunset.jpg”.

Nothing is deleted in the process. Duplicates move into a folder of their own that you can review at leisure. And because Zortio sorts by the date modified, the section above is worth a look first: if the pictures came in through a messenger, the date is wrong.