Transferring 400GB of media files from iPhone 15 Pro Max to Mac and Google Photos

It sounds like most of these pictures might not have been actually taken on the iPhone. Pictures transferred from a computer, for instance, can be nicely shown by Photos. But the cable transfer system was designed with the idea that those pictures would remain on the computer, so they aren't actually "owned" by Photos. This seems to happen to other sorts of pictures as well. I'm not sure they all work in the same way.

You may be able to use the app Image Capture in your Applications folder to transfer some (or all?) of these pictures to the Mac.

Another possibility is to save pictures to a folder in Files. When they are re-imported, then they should be under the control of Photos. Of course, then you 3 copies of the same picture.

Here's another thought: You can turn on iCloud Drive and transfer the pictures to Files>iCloud Drive. You get 5GB for free, so it might take a number of transfers and deletes. Or, you could buy 1 month of iCloud for $10, and do it all at once.

The biggest problem in using Files is that you would be tripling the storage, since each picture would be in two versions in Photos and one version in Files.

This is what I come up with-- what do you think?

But can you edit all the these reluctant Photos? And what happened with Image Capture?