What it picks up.
Every photo, every clip, every screen recording — anything the phone treats as a captured file. SyncShot reads the device once and copies what it finds, regardless of which Android brand wrote it or how the gallery has organised it.
- Photos
- Everything the camera shoots — JPEG, HEIC on devices that support it, RAW (DNG) on capable models — pulled at full resolution, single shots and bursts and panoramas alike.
- Video
- Standard 4K, slow-motion, time-lapse, the high-bitrate Pro modes on flagship Galaxies and Pixels. Long takes copy in a single pass with progress you can watch.
- Captures
- Screen recordings, screenshots, downloaded media, edits saved back to the gallery — copied alongside the rest, treated as device media like any other file.
- Metadata
- Timestamps, location, orientation, and the technical EXIF data the camera wrote — preserved as the file moves from phone to destination.
Where it sends.
One source, many destinations — and SyncShotreads the phone once, then fans the same files out to every place you chose. Pick one. Pick five. The phone doesn't wake up for each one.
- Internal disk
- Your Mac's own drive. The fastest target — usually first in the chain so the slower destinations can feed from it in the background.
- External drives
- USB-C and Thunderbolt SSDs, spinning HDDs, anything macOS mounts. Multiple drives at once if your shoot demands it.
- Network storage
- Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS, plain SMB shares. SyncShot writes over the network without blocking the local copy or slowing the phone read.
- Cloud
- S3 and S3-compatible buckets (Wasabi, R2, MinIO), Google Drive, Dropbox, Azure Blob. Same job, different destination — uploaded in parallel.
How it works.
- 01
Connect the phone
Cable in. Trust the Mac if it asks, and set the USB mode to file transfer when the phone prompts. SyncShot sees it as a source the moment macOS does — no driver, no companion app.
- 02
Choose destinations
Pick every place this shoot belongs. Save the set as a workflow if you'll use it again — next time it's one click.
- 03
Hit start
SyncShot reads the phone once and writes to every destination in parallel. The fastest disk finishes first; cloud uploads keep going in the background.
- 04
Trust the report
Every byte is hash-checked end to end. When the job finishes you get a report — what was copied, where it landed, every verification mark. The byte that left the phone is the byte that arrived.
The Android quirks.
The umbrella covers Android 11 and later on everything outside the Samsung, Pixel, and OnePlus brand pages — Xiaomi, Motorola, Sony Xperia, Nothing Phone, the rest. Stills arrive as JPEG or HEIC, with DNG on bodies whose OEM camera app allows it. Video and codecs vary by chipset and skin; SyncShot copies whatever the phone writes to disk, unchanged.
MTP behaviour is the main variable. Some OEMs ship a broken MTP stack — Xiaomi HyperOS is a repeat offender — and the workaround is ADB. Enable Developer Options, turn on USB Debugging, and SyncShot pulls over ADB instead. Directory layout is usefully consistent: DCIM/Camera is universal, and SyncShot walks the whole tree, so anything under Pictures/ or Movies/ — screenshots, downloaded clips, GCam and other third-party camera output — comes along in the same job.
Common questions.
- 01
Does SyncShot work with every Android phone?
If macOS mounts your Android — through Android File Transfer, Finder, or any MTP-aware tool — SyncShot can read it. No driver, no profile, no extra account.
- 02
Can it copy to my external drive and my NAS at the same time?
Yes. Pick as many destinations as you want — internal disk, external SSD, NAS, S3-compatible bucket, Google Drive — and SyncShot reads the phone once and feeds every destination in parallel.
- 03
What happens to the originals on the phone after a copy?
By default the originals stay on the phone — SyncShot is built to copy, not move. If a workflow does call for clearing the source after a verified copy, that's a conscious choice you make per workflow, never a surprise.
- 04
How do I know the copy is intact?
Every copy is hash-verified end to end. If a destination wrote something other than what the phone handed over, SyncShot flags it and retries — and the job report tells you exactly what landed where.
- 05
What if MTP does not work on my phone?
Some OEMs ship a broken MTP stack — Xiaomi HyperOS is a repeat offender — and the phone either does not mount or shows an empty file tree. The escape hatch is ADB. Enable Developer Options (tap Build Number seven times), turn on USB Debugging, and SyncShot pulls over ADB instead. Layout is consistent across brands: DCIM/Camera, Pictures/, Movies/, plus whatever GCam and third-party camera apps write.
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