I wanted to transfer 22,000 photos from my computer to my mobile. I found a better way to do this

• The ADB tool saves a lot of time compared to the MTP protocol, which is the classic option in Windows.

• There are apps that offer a GUI for ADB and make the process even easier.

I recently changed my phone and switched from Huawei P40 Pro+ to Pixel 8 Pro. I saved some of my photo library on my phone and also stored it on my NAS (I’m not a big fan of cloud services). I wanted to save these photos to Pixelbut I ran into a problem.

Pixels has a tool that allows you to transfer apps and data (including photos and videos) from your Android phone, but the tool didn’t work for me. My Huawei P40 Pro+ did not have the required version of Google services and applications for this process, so I had to look for a way to transfer all these images and videos.

I tried apps like SHAREit, but the process wasn’t particularly fast, and also copied images to a separate folder from the Google Pixel camera. There didn’t seem to be any direct alternatives, so I thought the best thing to do would be to copy images and videos from Huawei to Windows PC and then transfer them from PC to Pixel 8 Pro.

Transfer Images and Videos from Android Mobile to Windows PC this is trivial thanks to the MTP protocol (Multimedia Transfer Protocol). However, this method has a problem: it is not particularly fast, and I had to transfer a lot of images and videos: about 21,600 in total.

When estimating the time that the first transfer process (from Huawei mobile to PC) would take, Windows told me that it would take several hours, so I stopped the process.

It occurred to me to try transferring the same files through ADB (Android Debug Bridge), which is traditionally used for debugging Android devices or granting special permissions to certain applications.

However, this tool also has file transfer options from a mobile phone to a PC (pull) and vice versa (push). After learning how these options work and using ChatGPT, I ran a command from Powershell that would move all files with a mobile extension to a specific folder on the PC.

First, of course, you need to download ADB and unzip it to C:\ADB. Additionally, you need to activate the developer options on your Android mobile device to then enable USB debugging and after that simply go to the ADB folder to start the ADB server with simple devices “.\adb.exe”.

Once this is done, the necessary commands can now be executed. In my case, for example, for all 2019 images (all of them starting with the line “IMG_2019”) the command was:

& shell “C:\ADB\adb.exe” ls “/sdcard/DCIM/Camera/IMG_2019*.jpg” | ForEach-Object { & “C:\ADB\adb.exe” pull -a -p “$($_.Trim())” “C:\adbtests” }

This command also saves the timestamp of the photos (“-a”) and shows the progress (“-p”), allowing you to track how the copy is progressing. This is the fastest method, but there is another alternative: using ADB through an application that offers a GUI for this tool.

I tried a few other options, but ultimately settled on ADB Explorer, a small app that doesn’t require you to deal with the command line or Powershell.

The operation is simple: by activating USB debugging on your mobile phone and connecting it to the PC with a cable, we can see how ADB Explorer detects thisfrom which we can click “Browse” to display its folders and navigate through them.

There are two accesses at the top to copy files from mobile phone to PC (pull) or to copy them from PC to mobile phone (push). We won’t be able to use the copy and paste mechanism directly into the Windows Explorer window, but the mechanism is still simple.

In ADB Explorer, simply navigate to the folder that contains the files you want to transfer, select them, and then click the Copy to PC (pull) button. A window will open in which we can select the destination folder and once this is done the copying process will begin and a small blue progress line in the window will indicate the progress of the transfer.

To transfer images from PC to Pixel, I used the reverse process (push) and everything worked perfectly because I was able to place the images in the /sdcard/DCIM/Camera folder, which is exactly what Pixels uses to save its photos. .

Once the transfer is complete, there is one last step left: stopping the Google Photos process on the mobile phone. clear cache and data that was saved before (I didn’t have any photos taken on the Pixel yet) and then open Google Photos. When you do this, it’s like you opened it for the first time, and after a few moments it updated the library, where all the photos were already the same as they were on the Huawei. Fantastic.

As I said, to check which method is faster and before committing completely I wanted to do some tests and compare three methods: MTP, ADB Command Prompt and ADB Explorer. For this little test I only used the images I had on my Huawei 2019, there weren’t many (around 2200) since I started saving them in September.

I copied these 2200 images in three ways from my mobile phone to my computer and wanted to measure the time. As you can see, the fastest method is the command line, which This is approximately four times faster than the classic MTP method.

. ADB Explorer introduces some additional latency, but it’s also an interesting alternative that cuts MTP time by about half.

So, if you ever find yourself in a similar situation and have to transfer thousands of files between a Windows PC and an Android device, keep this in mind: ADB is the fastest option and can help you save a lot of time in the process. process. .

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