How to get photos from a Google Pixel onto a Mac

There are two good ways to get photos from a Pixel to a Mac. If Google Photos already backs the phone up, open photos.google.com on the Mac, select what you want and download it. If it does not, or you want the files exactly as the camera saved them, plug the phone in with a USB cable, choose PTP in the USB notification, and import with Image Capture, which comes with every Mac.

Recent Pixels have a third way for a handful of photos: Quick Share can send straight to a Mac's AirDrop. And whichever route you take, Pixel photos are JPEGs with an extra layer called Ultra HDR, which a Mac shows differently depending on the app.

Where a Pixel keeps its photos

Pixel Camera saves photos and videos in DCIM/Camera on the phone's storage, with names such as PXL_20261016_093012345.jpg: the date, then the time to the millisecond. Two other kinds of file live beside them.

• Motion photos end in .MP.jpg. Each is a full JPEG with a short video clip stored inside the same file. A Mac shows the still; the clip is still there, and a tool such as ExifTool can extract it.
• RAW photos, if you turned RAW on, are DNG files beside the JPEGs, and Lightroom and Photoshop open them.

Screenshots go to a Screenshots folder of their own, and images saved from apps usually land in Pictures or Download.

Google Photos

Google Photos is the Pixel's gallery, and with backup on, every photo goes up to your Google account. What arrives depends on the backup quality. In the app, tap your profile picture, then Photos settings, Backup and Backup quality:

• Original quality keeps each photo and video exactly as it was taken.
• Storage saver shrinks photos over 16 MP to 16 MP and videos over 1080p to 1080p.
• Express, offered only in some countries, goes down to 3 MP and 480p.

All three count against your Google storage, and the free 15 GB is shared with Gmail and Drive. One exception: the Pixel 2 to Pixel 5, not the 5a, keep free, unlimited Storage saver backups made from the phone itself. From the Pixel 6 on, everything counts.

To bring photos down to the Mac, open photos.google.com, select them, and choose Download from the menu; several at once arrive as a ZIP file. If you edited a photo in Google Photos, the download is the edited version. For a whole library, Google Takeout exports everything as large archives, and a big library can take hours to prepare. Backup itself takes videos of up to 10 GB each.

The catch is that everything travels twice, up from the phone and down to the Mac, at the speed of your internet connection. For a few photos that does not matter. For a year of 4K video it does.

With a cable

Image Capture

Plug the Pixel in, unlock it, pull down the notification shade and tap the USB notification. Under Use USB for, choose PTP. Open Image Capture on the Mac, select the phone under Devices, pick where the files should go, and click Import All (Download All in older versions of macOS). It copies the originals and installs nothing, but it sees only the camera roll and only goes from the phone to the Mac.

An MTP app

Choose File transfer / Android Auto instead, and the whole of the phone's storage is open to an MTP app such as the free OpenMTP, in both directions. macOS cannot read MTP by itself, so the files stay inside that app's window. Google's own Android File Transfer did this job until Google stopped offering it.

The phone in Finder

SideMount mounts the Pixel as a drive in Finder, so DCIM/Camera is a folder you drag like any other, and Lightroom can open the DNG files on the phone in place. Over a USB 3 cable it moves large files at well over 100 MB/s. It needs macOS 26 or later and USB debugging turned on once, which starts with tapping Build number seven times in Settings > About phone: the USB debugging guide has every step.

Quick Share to AirDrop

Since November 2025, Quick Share on a Pixel can send to Apple's AirDrop. It now works on the Pixel 8a and later, but not on the Pixel 8 or 8 Pro, and the Pixel 9 and later, except the 9a, can receive from AirDrop as well. On the Mac, open AirDrop in Control Centre and let everyone find it (Everyone), then share the photos from Google Photos and pick the Mac in Quick Share. The files go from phone to Mac directly, with no server in between, and usually land in the Mac's Downloads folder.

Ultra HDR photos on a Mac

Pixels from the Pixel 8 on save photos as Ultra HDR, and the Pixel 6 and 7 gained it in an update. An Ultra HDR photo is an ordinary JPEG with a second, hidden layer called a gain map, which tells an HDR screen how much brighter each part of the picture should be. Any app that does not understand the gain map shows the ordinary JPEG, so nothing ever fails to open.

On a Mac, what you see depends on the app and the file. Photos, Preview and Quick Look in macOS 15 and later read gain maps written to the ISO 21496-1 standard, and since Android 15, Android can write that form alongside Google's own. Older Ultra HDR files may show as the plain JPEG, a little flatter than on the phone, and Finder's thumbnails never show HDR. The bright version is still in the file: copy it as it is, and avoid tools that re-save or recompress the JPEG, which can drop the gain map. If you would rather not have it, the Pixel Camera app has an Ultra HDR switch in its settings.

Pixel video on a Mac

Pixel Camera's video settings let you choose the format: H.264, the older and more widely played, or HEVC (H.265), which makes smaller files. On some versions of the app the HEVC choice is a switch called Store videos efficiently. Every Mac since macOS High Sierra plays HEVC. The Pixel 10 can also record AV1, smaller again; Macs with an M3 chip or later decode it in hardware, and VLC plays it on older ones. For long clips, see moving big videos from Android to a Mac, and if the Pixel does not appear on the Mac at all, Android not showing up on a Mac has the fixes. SideMount's setup guide covers the first connection.

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