It has been quite a few months since the last time I backed-up the images from my iPhone to iTunes, so I decided it was probably a good idea to do it now considering the age of my iPhone 3G. When I connected the device to my iMac, it detected the iPhone and found all 1186 images, but then hit me with a ‘cannot read image format’ warning message!

After disconnecting and reconnecting my iPhone twenty times and restarting my iMac equally as often a change in strategy was needed. So to save others having to go through this frustrating process here is the what I did…

Hard reset your iPhone (Still not sure why I didn’t do this in the first place!)

To do this hold the power button and the home button simultaneously, keep holding this even when the red power off slider appears and until the phone completely switches off. Now restart your iPhone connect it directly to your Mac and launch iPhoto, now iPhoto should pick up all the images on your device with no problems, it’s as easy as that!

I am using an iPhone 3G and iPhoto 09 so this may only work depending on your setup. If this doesn’t work don’t despair, there is another way if iPhoto simply won’t play. On most iMacs there is a piece of software called ‘image capture’ which works just as well. Using the same process attach your iPhone while image capture is open, it will then detect your device and give you the option to download the images to a folder of your choice.

I hope this helps any iPhone and iPhoto users out there, however, if you have any other solutions or fixes for this issue I would like to hear from you.

A more detailed overview of this security issue and other ways to stay secure can be found here – http://wordpress.org/development/2009/09/keep-wordpress-secure/