Return to Question

Other sites just do variations of the above.

The problem is that my Pixel is full, 253 GB used of 256 GB. All of my personal photos and videos are archived in Google Photos (at non-original quality, otherwise they would swamp my online storage), so I now want to move 180 GB of videos and photos (the original quality) from my Pixel phone to my Windows PC. I don't really mind how.

Edit, thanks to @Gantendo's answer below, I got this fully working and just want to include the full resolution for anyone that might happen to hit the same need as me to fully extract files from an Android phone:

To enable file transfer, Settings > System > Developer options, quite far down is "Default USB configuration". By default, this is set to "No data transfer". The other options are "File transfer / Android Auto", "USB tethering", "MIDI", "PTP", and "Webcam". Select "File transfer" here to get MTP (Media Transfer Mode), or PTP (Photo Transfer Protocol). I went for PTP as it is focused on the photo transfer that I wanted. In this mode you can only see the DCIM/Photo folders, possibly use MTP if you want other files.

Once you select MTP or PTP, the Windows Photo app will open up and start indexing the photos and offer to copy them into OneDrive. This failed for me completely, the connection falls apart at some point, maybe around 10% of the copy (for my 180 GB of photos and films), so do not use this.

The other option is to just go to Windows Explorer and copy the files from there, but this has the same problem as the Photo app, as the connection will always fall apart after a while in my experience. Then, as the phone is not a proper filesystem, it will be hard to work out what copied and what did not.

Resilio Sync was a complete success though, even though you can see the connection go to zero speed at times, it always re-establishes the connection and continues the copy, so the copy completed flawlessly.

1. Make sure that Resilio is installed and running on both the Windows PC and the Phone.
2. Go to the Windows side and define the default folder / download folder to save the files.
3. Then, go to Resilio Sync on the phone and go to the Folders page. Press the "+" in the bottom right.
4. On the page there is a SHARE section ("Send Files") and a SYCHRONIZE section ("Create folder" and "Add backup"). Press "Add backup" and choose the folder to share (if in PTP, the selection will be limited, change to MTP as above to select more folders to backup). For the original quality photos and films created by my phones Camera app, select the "Camera backup" option here (which corresponds to the "DCIM" folder on the root of the phone).
5. A token authorisation link is now created, and you have to send that to yourself by email or other sharing option (which the app presents to you).
6. Go back to the Windows system and open up the authorisation link just sent to confirm it.
7. Go back to the phone and complete the authorisation handshake. This is not immediately obvious, you have to back out of the Folders page to the Resilio Sync app main page, then the Notification will be a red dot in the top right, select that and approve it.
8. The backup will immediately start on the Windows side. Press the lightning bolt in bottom right to view progress, speed etc.

Other sites just do variations of the above that got me nowhere.

The problem is that my Pixel is full, 253 GB used of 256 GB. All of my personal photos and videos are archived in Google Photos (at non-original quality, otherwise they would swamp my online storage), so I now want to move ~180 GB of videos and photos (the original quality) from my Pixel phone to my Windows PC. I don't really mind how.

Edit, thanks to @Gantendo's answer below, I got this fully working and just want to include all of the steps for anyone that might happen to hit the same need as me to fully extract files from an Android phone:

To enable file transfer, Settings > System > Developer options, quite far down is "Default USB configuration". By default, this is set to "No data transfer". The other options are "File transfer / Android Auto", "USB tethering", "MIDI", "PTP", and "Webcam". Select "File transfer" here to get MTP (Media Transfer Mode), or you can select PTP (Photo Transfer Protocol). I went for PTP as it is focused on photos/videos transfer as I wanted (possibly use MTP if you want other files).

Once I selected PTP, the Windows Photo app opened and started automatically indexing the photos and offered to upload them into OneDrive. I hit ok, and then after about 10 minutes, the connection falls over, just as I saw with Windows Explorer copy. I find that for both of these, the connection always seems to fall over, and, it will then be hard to work out what copied and what did not to determine what is left to copy.

Resilio Sync was a complete success though, even though you can see the connection go to zero speed at times, it always re-establishes the connection and continues the copy, so the copy completed flawlessly. I found the interface a little quirky though so here are the steps that worked for me:

1. Make sure that Resilio is installed and running on both the Windows PC and the Phone.
2. Go to the Windows PC and define the default folder / download folder to save the files.
3. Then, go to Resilio Sync on the phone and go to the Folders page. Press the "+" in the bottom right.
4. On the page there is a SHARE section ("Send Files") and a SYCHRONIZE section ("Create folder" and "Add backup"). Press "Add backup" and choose the folder to share (if in PTP, the selection will be limited, change to MTP as above to select more folders to backup). For the original quality photos and films created by my phones Camera app, select the "Camera backup" option here (which corresponds to the "DCIM" folder on the root of the phone).
5. A token authorisation link is now created, and you have to send that to yourself by email or other sharing option (which the app presents to you).
6. Go back to the Windows system and open up the authorisation link just sent in the last step and confirm it on the Windows PC.
7. Go back to the phone and complete the authorisation handshake. This is not immediately obvious, as you have to back out of the Folders page to the Resilio Sync app main page, where the Notifications will show a red dot in the top right, select that and approve it.
8. The backup will immediately start on the Windows side. Press the lightning bolt in the bottom right to view progress, speed etc.

The problem is that my Pixel is full, 253 GB used of 256 GB. All of my personal photos and videos are archived in Google Photos, so I now want to move 80 GB of videos and photos from my Pixel phone to my Windows PC. I don't really mind how.

My experiences with the File Transfer setting in Android are awful: I enable this setting, then open Windows Explorer and navigate into the phone and then open another window in the empty folder on my PC that I want to move to. In Windows Explorer looking the Pixel folder, I do CTRL+A and then CTRL+X to cut the files, then go to the Windows folder and do CTRL+V. It copies a lot of files, but it does not move the files, and the usage on the Pixel is unchanged. Then, it always crashes after a while, so I'm left with a completely broken situation.

Ideally, I'd like to mount the Pixel as an external drive (say X:) and just go into it and robocopy from there to the Windows PC (I get that it's some kind of Linux filesystem, but isn't there a way to just get the Pixel to completely synchronise a folder to my Windows PC?)

1. Make sure that Resilio is installed and running on both the Windows PC and the Phone.
2. Go to the Windows side and define the default folder / download folder to save the files.
3. Then, go to Resilio Sync on the phone and go to the Folders page. Press the "+" in the bottom right.
4. On the page there is a SHARE section ("Send Files") and a SYCHRONIZE section ("Create folder" and "Add backup"). Press "Add backup" and choose the folder to share (if in PTP, the selection will be limited, change to MTP as above to select more folders to backup). For the original quality photos and films created by my phones Camera app, select the "Camera backup" option here (which corresponds to the "DCIM" folder on the root of the phone).
5. A token authorisation link is now created, and you have to send that to yourself by email or other sharing option (which the app presents to you).
6. Go back to the Windows, system and open up the authorisation link.
7. Go back to the phone and complete the handshake. This is not immediately obvious, you have to back out of the Folders page to the main page, then the Notification will be in the top right, select that and approve it.
8. The backup will immediately start on the Windows side. Press the lightning bolt in bottom right to view progress, speed etc.

The problem is that my Pixel is full, 253 GB used of 256 GB. All of my personal photos and videos are archived in Google Photos (at non-original quality, otherwise they would swamp my online storage), so I now want to move 180 GB of videos and photos (the original quality) from my Pixel phone to my Windows PC. I don't really mind how.

My experiences with the File Transfer setting in Android are awful: I enable this setting, then open Windows Explorer and navigate into the phone, and then open another window in the empty folder on my PC that I want to move to. In Windows Explorer looking into the Pixel folder, I do CTRL+A and then CTRL+X to cut the files, then go to the Windows folder and do CTRL+V. It copies a lot of files, but it does not move the files, and the usage on the Pixel is unchanged. Then, it always crashes after a while, so I'm left with a completely broken situation.

Ideally, I'd like to mount the Pixel as an external drive (say X:) and just go into it and robocopy from there to the Windows PC (I get that it's some kind of Linux filesystem, but isn't there a way to just get the Pixel to completely synchronise a folder to my Windows PC?).

1. Make sure that Resilio is installed and running on both the Windows PC and the Phone.
2. Go to the Windows side and define the default folder / download folder to save the files.
3. Then, go to Resilio Sync on the phone and go to the Folders page. Press the "+" in the bottom right.
4. On the page there is a SHARE section ("Send Files") and a SYCHRONIZE section ("Create folder" and "Add backup"). Press "Add backup" and choose the folder to share (if in PTP, the selection will be limited, change to MTP as above to select more folders to backup). For the original quality photos and films created by my phones Camera app, select the "Camera backup" option here (which corresponds to the "DCIM" folder on the root of the phone).
5. A token authorisation link is now created, and you have to send that to yourself by email or other sharing option (which the app presents to you).
6. Go back to the Windows system and open up the authorisation link just sent to confirm it.
7. Go back to the phone and complete the authorisation handshake. This is not immediately obvious, you have to back out of the Folders page to the Resilio Sync app main page, then the Notification will be a red dot in the top right, select that and approve it.
8. The backup will immediately start on the Windows side. Press the lightning bolt in bottom right to view progress, speed etc.

=====

Edit, thanks to @Gantendo's answer below, I got this fully working and just want to include the full resolution for anyone that might happen to hit the same need as me to fully extract files from an Android phone:

Firstly, probably good to make sure that the phone will stay awake / unlocked. For Pixel 7, this was at Settings > System > Developer options > Stay awake (This will only make the phone stay on while it is plugged in, it will still go to sleep when unplugged).

To enable file transfer, Settings > System > Developer options, quite far down is "Default USB configuration". By default, this is set to "No data transfer". The other options are "File transfer / Android Auto", "USB tethering", "MIDI", "PTP", and "Webcam". Select "File transfer" here to get MTP (Media Transfer Mode), or PTP (Photo Transfer Protocol). I went for PTP as it is focused on the photo transfer that I wanted. In this mode you can only see the DCIM/Photo folders, possibly use MTP if you want other files.

Once you select MTP or PTP, the Windows Photo app will open up and start indexing the photos and offer to copy them into OneDrive. This failed for me completely, the connection falls apart at some point, maybe around 10% of the copy (for my 180 GB of photos and films), so do not use this.

The other option is to just go to Windows Explorer and copy the files from there, but this has the same problem as the Photo app, as the connection will always fall apart after a while in my experience. Then, as the phone is not a proper filesystem, it will be hard to work out what copied and what did not.

Resilio Sync was a complete success though, even though you can see the connection go to zero speed at times, it always re-establishes the connection and continues the copy, so the copy completed flawlessly.

1. Make sure that Resilio is installed and running on both the Windows PC and the Phone.
2. Go to the Windows side and define the default folder / download folder to save the files.
3. Then, go to Resilio Sync on the phone and go to the Folders page. Press the "+" in the bottom right.
4. On the page there is a SHARE section ("Send Files") and a SYCHRONIZE section ("Create folder" and "Add backup"). Press "Add backup" and choose the folder to share (if in PTP, the selection will be limited, change to MTP as above to select more folders to backup). For the original quality photos and films created by my phones Camera app, select the "Camera backup" option here (which corresponds to the "DCIM" folder on the root of the phone).
5. A token authorisation link is now created, and you have to send that to yourself by email or other sharing option (which the app presents to you).
6. Go back to the Windows, system and open up the authorisation link.
7. Go back to the phone and complete the handshake. This is not immediately obvious, you have to back out of the Folders page to the main page, then the Notification will be in the top right, select that and approve it.
8. The backup will immediately start on the Windows side. Press the lightning bolt in bottom right to view progress, speed etc.