Photos, unless chosen to be shot in RAW and the highest resolution at all times, are comparatively not as big a deal on space used with the HEIC format (choose High Efficiency as the format in the camera settings).
Since most people tend to keep all or most of the photos they ever shot over the years on their phones, it just adds up.
Size/cost/quality wise, that’s so much better than old school VHS/camcorders it makes my head hurt.
Pretty awesome for sure. Still no free lunch though.
What do iPhone users do to get all that data off their phones and onto their macbooks?
Hell, nowadays it does the same for photos and videos taken by my SO if they took the photo/video while I was with them.
Now that I think about it, I’ve got “Optimize Storage” enabled on my devices, so if storage is running low it should keep a lower resolution instead of the original stored locally. But I suppose they must use a FIFO logic, because my most recent stuff is always available locally in full resolution.
If I need the older stuff for a project I click export on it and it’ll download the full resolution, which doesn’t take more than a few seconds because I’ve got 1Gbit fiber connection.
I guess the closest thing that comes to a manual transfer would be AirDrop where it would transfer it via a 5Ghz ad-hoc WiFi connection (or via LAN if the extra hop via the router would be faster with an ethernet connected Mac in the olden days).
In practice it reaches about 1Gbps, but I rarely to use it because by the time I need it it’s already synced. I only use it a few times a year when I’ve shot B-roll with the iPhone at my desk and immediately jump into editing.
I haven’t used a cable to transfer data to/from my iPhone in probably more than a decade with the sole exception being when I push out builds from Xcode to the iPhone.