[dmmontal]

I recently purchased the Lumia 950 XL and have had a pretty terrible experience transferring photos from my Windows 10 PC to the device. I'm unsure if this post would be most appropriate in this forum, or in general Windows 10 Mobile - but thought it would more likely be a hardware issues, so I figured I'd start here. The process and issues I'm experiencing are as follows:

With phone connected to PC via the included USB-c cable, I'm dragging and dropping my photo albums from my PC into the Pictures folder in the phone's local memory. However every so often, the transfer will hang on a specific photo. Sometimes it will hang for minutes at a time and I'll need to kill the process manually. Other times it will error out, saying "the device stopped working or was disconnected". Once either situation occurs, the phone's folders in Explorer become unresponsive (i.e. clicking through the phone's folders, refreshing the view, and ejecting the phone via the taskbar do not work), and I must physically unplug the phone and plug it back into the computer in order to be able to try again. The phone interface itself remains functioning and fully accessible while this is occurring.

Typically I can get a problem photo to work by opening it in Photoshop, making some small change (i.e. drawing a single pixel in it), and saving it. This seems to clear whatever error was in place, but only until I hit the next time this happens on subsequent photos. In some cases I've been able to add photos or full albums without issue - in others, every single photo in an album was problematic and could not be fixed by altering in Photoshop.

I've looked for issues in the photos themselves, but don't see anything that's telling me what they may have in common vs photos that do work - they open fine on the PC and don't appear to be corrupt. This never occurred previously with these same photos when transferring in the same fashion to my Lumia 1520 via a standard USB cable. I thought perhaps I had a faulty USB-c cable, but I tried with two spare cables and the same thing occurred. I also tried using different USB ports on my computer (both USB 2.0 and 3.0) and nothing changed. Rebooting the PC / phone doesn't help either. I've yet to test if this also happens with other file types, i.e. music.

Has anyone experienced similar issues? I'm unsure if this could be a problem with my phone specifically, or the new USB-c input, or even with the Windows 10 Mobile OS (this is the first time I'm using it - I was not a Preview member previously). I've seen a few other threads out on the web that seem somewhat similar, but they always mention this being a problem specific to memory cards, whereas I'm trying to transfer directly to the phone's internal memory, not to the memory card.

I'd greatly appreciate if anyone has any insight or suggestions on the matter. Thanks in advance very much.

[dKp1977]

Just asking and I might be heading in a completely wrong direction, but is it possible that you've setup a PIN to wake up your phone from standbye? I've had similar things like you described happen when I was still using a PIN and the device went into standbye. Everytime this happened Windows couldn't access the file system on the phone anymore, which lead to either an error or made me end the exlorer.exe task in Windows.

[dmmontal]

Hmm - an interesting thought and appreciate the response, but no I don't have the pin enabled (either in general or to kick in upon entering standby). I've received these issues with the phone locked, unlocked and on the home screen, and even unlocked and browsing through the photos app itself. None of these situations seem to affect whether the file transfer errors out or not.

[mdbuilder]

Why not use One Drive? Transfer from the PC to One Drive or sync your photo folder to One Drive, open the Onedrive app on the phone and you can browse you photo's, click on a photo and it will download to the phone.

[dmmontal]

I do actually use OneDrive extensively - all my photos and files are stored there. However, given the phone's large quantity of internal storage, I prefer to keep my photo albums and other content stored locally on the device, so I am not at the mercy of an internet connection.

Ultimately for the couple albums that just would not work at all, I did download them from OneDrive onto the phone. However I consider this a workaround and not a resolution for the actual problem. I appreciate the suggestion though.