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You either purchased a new computer, reinstalled your system or just reinstalled iTunes
Now, if you connect your iPhone to your Computer, you may lose all your iPhone data, because synchronizing an iPhone with an empty iTunes library can erase its whole contents
There are manual ways to Copy iPhone
songs to a Computer and then import
them to iTunes
Unfortunately, this does not preserve what makes your iPhone unique and priceless: all the personal settings you've built over time:
- Playlists
- Ratings
- Play counts
- Album artwork
- Date last played
- Date last skipped
- Date added
- Skipped count
- Default volume
- Start time
- Stop time
- Artist
- Album
- Podcasts & subscriptions
- Audiobooks
- Videos
- Contacts
- Games
- Apps
- Skip when shuffling
- Remember playback position
- Episode ID
- Episode number
- Season number
- Etc...
That's a lot of precious stuff !
Now, to Rebuild iTunes based on your iPhone including all your personal settings, you need a third party program
- Start by getting it from here
- Install it
- Open the program with the shortcut on your Desktop
- Just hit the "Start Backup" button
After a couple of minutes, all your iPhone data are back in iTunes !
From now on, you can sync your iPhone with iTunes again, just the way you always did !
Notes & possible issues
- This procedure will also Transfer purchased songs from iPhone to iTunes
- It will Update iTunes Library based on iPhone, which means if some of your songs are already in iTunes, it will skip them and not create duplicates
- The above procedure is based on the automatic mode ( recommended )
For more advanced users, this program offers all expectable fine-tuning options
Just hit the "Manual Backup" button and you get access to a full range of advanced settings:
- Filter the elements you wish to transfer by:
- Song
- Playlist
- Artist
- Album
- Genre
- Etc...
- Customize the way your songs are imported to both your Computer and iTunes:
- Automatic song renaming options based on combinations of Artist, Album, Name,...
- Folder / sub-folder structure creation based on Artists, Albums,...
- Metadata ( personal settings ) to be imported or not: Ratings, Play counts, Date last played ( see full list above )
- Etc...
Mike Johnson
Founder and Editor of sync-iphone.com has a sincere desire to provide readers with honest and useful solutions for their iPhone
More about him on Google+
Note: if you encounter problems with iTunes trying to erase your iPhone from the new computer, read our Prevent iTunes from syncing iPhone instructions
Probably the biggest limitation with iTunes is the one-way transfer allowing to synchronize iPhone and Computer only from the PC to the iPhone
What if you want to transfer your iPhone the other way round: from iPhone to Computer / iTunes ?
The only way to Copy iPhone to Computer is to use a dedicated program
We describe the iPhone to PC procedure in our Sync iPhone to iTunes tutorial
Notes & possible issues
- This solution works for both Mac and PC
- In case you only want to copy your iPhone files to your Computer and not import them to iTunes, select the "Manual Mode" described in the "Notes & possible issues" section of the Sync iPhone to iTunes tutorial
Mike Johnson
Founder and Editor of sync-iphone.com has a sincere desire to provide readers with honest and useful solutions for their iPhone
More about him on Google+
Note: if you encounter problems with iTunes trying to erase your iPhone from one of the computers, read our Prevent iTunes from syncing iPhone instructions
As mentioned in a previous post, iTunes only allows one-way synchronizations from Computer to iPhone
Then, if you connect your iPhone to a Computer whose library is different from your iPhone's, you may end up with unwanted song deletions on your iPhone
To prevent this and be able to Synchronize your iPhone with several Computers, you need to transfer data from your iPhone to the Computers where this data is missing
Once all your Computers libraries are complete and synchronized, you can sync your iPhone with any of your Computers without risking to lose songs from your iPhone
Just follow these steps
- Start by synchronizing your iPod / iPhone with iTunes on your first Computer ( the one that is most complete )
- Unplug your iPod / iPhone from that first Computer
- Connect your iPod / iPhone to the second Computer and follow the procedure to Sync iPhone to iTunes and transfer iPhone contents to iTunes onto the second Computer
You are all set !
Now that you know how to synchronize an iPhone with two computers, feel free to do so with as many computers as you want
Notes & possible issues
- This solution works for both Mac and PC
- In case your songs are spread across several computers none of which contains your complete library, set your iPhone to Manual Mode. Then, transfer the songs from every library to your iPhone and finally follow this procedure to populate every Computer with your whole library based on your iPhone
Mike Johnson
Founder and Editor of sync-iphone.com has a sincere desire to provide readers with honest and useful solutions for their iPhone
More about him on Google+
To discover How to Transfer songs from iPhone to Computer, please refer to our dedicated tutorial
Notes & possible issues
- This solution works for both Mac and PC
Mike Johnson
Founder and Editor of sync-iphone.com has a sincere desire to provide readers with honest and useful solutions for their iPhone
More about him on Google+
Definitely one of the poorest iTunes features is the way it handles Pictures
Whether you want to:
- Get Photos off iPhone
- Download Photos to iPhone
- Transfer Pictures from iPhone to Computer
- Copy Photos from iPhone to PC
- Add Photos to iPhone
- Delete / Remove / Erase Photos individually from iPhone
- etc...
iTunes is way too limited
What we need is a visual interface with thumbnails we can drag between iPhone Albums and Computer Folders
We've been looking around for a long time and tested all possible iPhone Photo Management softwares
Most were disappointing until we bumped into a pretty cool piece of software
It's a two-sided Program, which clearly shows iPhone Photographs on one side and Computer Pictures on the other
You can move, drag photos both ways from Computer to iPhone and the other way round, create Photo Albums, rename and edit existing ones, etc...
Give it a try and let us know what you think by dropping comments below
Notes & possible issues
- This solution works for all iPod, including iPod Touch, iPhone 4 and iPad
Mike Johnson
Founder and Editor of sync-iphone.com has a sincere desire to provide readers with honest and useful solutions for their iPhone
More about him on Google+
