For many years, including on OS X 10.9 (Snow Leopard) and on OS X 10.11 (El Capitan), I have relied on AutoImporter.app to automatically import photos from my iPhone when it is connected to my Mac.

Unfortunately AutoImporter.app stopped working when I upgraded to iOS 10.3.1 -- it launches, but does not import anything, when the phone is connected while logged in (whether or not the phone is locked). It seems like this issue might have started with with iOS 10.2 -- but I went straight from 9.x to 10.3.1, so do not know if 10.2 or 10.3 first introduced the problem.

In my case even logging in with the phone connected and unlocked does not seem to work for me on OS X 10.11 (El Capitan). From reading bug reports (and some hints in a Reddit thread) it appears the issue is that AutoImporter.app is starting correctly, but is unable to get a list of photos to import -- which is consistent with opening, but showing a 100% progress bar immediately then closing.

Manually importing into Photos.app (with Photos.app auto-launched) appears to be Apple's official answer, but I do not want a manual import -- or to use Photos.app. Supposedly the iCloud My Photo Stream feature can get in the way, but I do not have any iCloud features turned on, and other users report it made no differnce for them. So my current pick is that something changed around enumerating the list of photos on the iPhone, and no one bothered to upgrade AutoImporter.app to match :-( Some users report upgrading to recent versions of macOS Sierra (but only recent versions) made it work again -- however I am not about to embark on a major OS upgrade at present, just in the hope of making this one thing work again.

For now I am trying to remember to periodically use "Image Capture.app" to manually import new images off my iPhone as a backup (in addition to the automatic copy in the iTunes backup of my phone). Sadly this is rather less convenient than the automatically running import.

To use "Image Capture.app" to do a manual import:

  • connect the iPhone to the computer

  • open the "Image Capture.app"

  • select the phone from the list of devices, and if necessary enter the passcode on the phone to unlock it and grant access

  • highlight the photos since the last import (:-( ), eg determined by the file names or date

  • make sure the destination setting at the bottom is "Pictures"

  • make sure that the "Make subfolders per camera" setting is ticked (to replicate how I had AutoImporter.app set up)

  • make sure "Delete after import" is not ticked (in the bottom left area)

Then click on "Import" at the bottom right.

It appears that "Image Capture.app" may recognise the photos which are already imported, once everything else is set up (eg, they have a green tick), so the step of selecting the new photos may not be necessary -- or may be able to be guided by those green ticks -- but for now I am still doing that step of determining what to import manually, in order to have more control over what is imported.

Hopefully eventually there is an OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) update that restores this useful automatic import functionality.