Transfer photos from a Xiaomi phone to a Mac

Pick File transfer in the USB notification — and note that turning on USB debugging silently switches a Xiaomi back out of it. Then copy, or use RollFerry.

19 September 2026

Plug the phone in, pull down the notification shade, tap the USB notification and choose File transfer. HyperOS and MIUI both start in charging-only mode, so until you change it the Mac sees nothing at all.

Then the trap that catches everyone on a Redmi or a Poco: turning on USB debugging takes the phone straight back out of File transfer mode. If you were in developer options recently — or a tutorial told you to enable debugging — that is very likely why the phone stopped appearing. Set the USB mode again afterwards.

The phone in the second test

RollFerry is developed against a OnePlus Nord CE 2 and checked on a Xiaomi Redmi 12C. The Redmi found 645 new items, pulled its own thumbnails and dates from the phone, and showed months going back to 2025 — with no code changed between the two phones.

One honest detail about thumbnails on Xiaomi, and probably most Androids: the picture the phone hands over for a tile is the JPEG’s embedded EXIF thumbnail. Photos that never had one — WhatsApp images, screenshots, downloads, edited or received photos — do not have a thumbnail to give. RollFerry reads those files directly for the tiles you can actually see, so nothing stays blank, but it is why the grid fills in two passes rather than one.

Where a Xiaomi keeps photos

• DCIM/Camera — the camera roll.
• Pictures/Screenshots — screenshots.
• Pictures/ — edited copies, images saved by apps, MIUI’s own folders.
• Movies/ — some video.
• Android/media/com.whatsapp/ — WhatsApp media on current Android.

Anything the gallery is showing from the cloud has no bytes on the phone. A USB tool can only copy files that are really on the device.

The free way

Switch the USB mode to PTP and macOS treats the phone as a camera, so Image Capture in your Applications folder can list the camera roll and import it.

It shows the camera folder and nothing else, gives you a flat pile rather than folders by date, keeps no record of what it already imported, does not verify a copy, and starts again if the cable moves. Fine for a handful of photos.

Mi PC Suite is Windows-only, so it is not an option here.

Doing it with RollFerry

RollFerry is a Mac app for photos and videos over a cable, and nothing else.

1. Plug in. It finds the phone and reads the media folders — the Redmi 12C came up with its own name and 645 new items.
2. See what is new. Only what is missing from your Mac, grouped by month, with the phone’s own thumbnails where they exist. Pick a month, a range, or everything. There is a source filter too, so you can take the camera roll and leave the screenshots.
3. Cross. Every file is copied and then checked byte for byte with SHA-256. A tick means it landed. Unplug halfway and you lose at most the file that was mid-copy; plug back in and it continues.

Files land in ordinary 2026/08 folders wherever you point it — your Mac or an external drive. Nothing is renamed or re-encoded, nothing is uploaded, and there is no account to make.

Freeing space on the phone is a separate step you ask for. RollFerry checks each file twice before deleting it — a verified record from the copy, and the copy still present on your Mac at the recorded size — and anything that fails either check stays where it is.

How the files are arranged on the Mac

You pick the destination — a folder on the Mac or an external drive — and the layout:

• Year and month, 2026/08/IMG_20260814_103211.jpg. The default.
• Year, one folder per year.
• Flat, everything in one folder.

Dates come from the file, not from when you copied it, so photos from 2025 land in 2025. Names are never changed and nothing is re-encoded, so what arrives on the Mac is byte for byte what was on the phone — which is exactly what the SHA-256 check confirms before a file counts as landed.

Getting the phone back into File transfer mode

If you have been in developer options, or a guide told you to enable USB debugging, the phone is almost certainly in a different USB mode now. Unplug, plug back in, pull down the shade and set it again. It is not a Mac problem and no app can work around it.

If the Xiaomi does not show up

1. USB notification → File transfer.
2. If you enabled USB debugging, set the USB mode again. It is the most common cause on these phones.
3. Quit Preview, Image Capture and Photos on the Mac — macOS runs a camera service that claims the phone before anything else can.
4. Use the cable from the phone’s box, straight into the Mac.

More on each in Android File Transfer not working on macOS.