Portara
Support

Imports that finish.

Portara copies photos and videos from an iPhone, iPad or camera to your Mac — without stopping on a broken file, and without copying anything twice.

Common questions

My import stopped partway through and the device disconnected.
Some files cannot be read by the device itself — a damaged video will crash the phone's media service and take the USB session down with it. Portara reopens the session and keeps going, and it remembers the file that caused it so later imports skip straight past. The file is named in the import summary so you can find and delete it. If you want to retry it later, clear the list under Import Options.
The app says my iPhone is locked.
A locked iPhone refuses host access. Unlock it, and for long imports set Settings › Display & Brightness › Auto-Lock to Never so it does not lock partway through. Set it back afterwards.
Will it copy photos I already imported?
No. Before each import Portara scans your destination folder — including subfolders from previous imports with a different layout. Files matching by name, size and capture date are skipped without transferring anything. Anything ambiguous is verified by SHA-256 comparison, so a duplicate is never written twice and a genuinely different file is never overwritten.
Can I connect over Wi-Fi?
Not for iPhone or iPad. Apple removed wireless photo access for iOS devices, so a USB cable is the only option. This is a limitation of the platform, not of Portara.
How are files organised?
Your choice: Photos/ and Videos/, year and month folders, both combined, or everything flat in one folder. Original filenames are always kept, and capture dates are restored on the copied files so they sort correctly in Finder.
Does it change my photos in any way?
No. Files are copied byte for byte, so EXIF, location data and video metadata arrive untouched. Nothing on your device is deleted or modified.
Something else went wrong.
Open the diagnostics view from the toolbar, press Copy All, and email it with a description of what happened. The log records exactly what the device reported, which usually identifies the problem immediately.

Requirements

  • macOS 14 Sonoma or later, Apple silicon or Intel.
  • An iPhone, iPad, camera or USB card reader connected by cable.
  • For iOS devices: unlocked, with "Trust This Computer" accepted.

Get in touch

Bug reports, questions and feature requests all go to support@chateclipse.com. Attaching the diagnostics log makes a bug report far easier to act on.