By Jason Lexow - September 29th, 2020
This tutorial should work similarly for all modern Android phones and PCs. There are always exceptions though, so if you encounter any issues throughout the process or the tutorial flat-out doesn't work for you feel free to contact us and we'll do our best to help you! We even have a Discord server now that we can chat with you on.
The first step is to connect your Android phone to your computer using the USB charging cable. Which USB port on your computer you plug it into shouldn't matter, but if your phone doesn't show up in Windows your best bet would be trying a different USB port and seeing if that works.
After that, your phone should make a noise. Next, open your phone. If your phone is locked, you will have to unlock it first. You should see a prompt on the screen asking 'Allow access to phone data?'. Press allow. Next, in Windows if you open up the File Explorer and click on 'This PC' on the bar to the left you should see a new device called whatever your model of phone is (in my case 'Galaxy A5').
Double-click on your phone in the device list to open it. Inside you should see another device, typically called either 'Phone' or 'Internal Storage' or something similar. This is your phone's actual storage, double-click to access it. If you have an SD card in your phone to give it extra storage like I do, this will also show up here. In some cases your phone will store images on this SD card, in which case simply double-click on the device labeled 'Card' or something similar instead, and then resume following this tutorial. The rest of the steps should be the same.
Inside this, you will see a number of folders. The one you're looking for is called 'DCIM'. Double-click the 'DCIM' folder.
Inside, you will find another folder, this one simply called 'Camera'. Inside this folder is where all of the pictures you take with your phone will be saved.
On Windows, copying over your files is fortunately very easy. Select the pictures you want to copy (you can quickly select multiple images by holding down the left mouse button and dragging it across the images you want to select), then right-click and select either 'Copy' or 'Cut'. Copy, as the name suggests, makes a copy somewhere else, leaving the original images intact. Cut makes a copy then automatically deletes the originals, which can be helpful if you want to free up space on your phone.