Sync Photos from a Camera SD Card to your Phone

As I get used to owning a Fujifilm X-E3 compact mirrorless APS-C camera, one thing I’ve just figured out is how I can transfer photos and videos off it to my Android phone.

The Fuji app is supposed to do a lot of this automatically, but I’ve found it unreliable (often not connecting to the camera), doesn’t sync video, and needs to use its own WiFi hotspot for the transfer.

What I’ve figured out is I can use a USB on-the-go (OTG) adaptor, USB SD card reader, and a couple of apps to do everything I need. Here’s how you can set up the same workflow:

Get a USB OTG adaptor and USB SD Card Reader. Make sure your phone can read the SD card when it’s attached.

You’ll need to use a file-browsing app to look for the attached USB device; phone manufacturers usually pre-install one for you.

If you can see the files on your SD card, you can move onto the next step!

Next download FolderSync. This will allow you to sync the files from your SD card to your phones’ internal memory. Set up a ‘folder pair’ to sync the files where you want them (even to the Cloud).

Now you’ve got the files syncing from your SD card to your phone, you may need to perfect things depending on the camera you have. Fujifilm cameras  save videos as .MOV files which don’t show up in Google Photos or the gallery app (not on Samsung phones anyway).

To fix this, I’ve used an app called Automate to rename the copied files to .MOV.mp4. That (weirdly) sorts it out!

If you haven’t seen Automate before, it’s a bit like Tasker, but you build the automation (flow) using blocks.

The MOV renamer process I built looks like this;

This can be added to my homescreen as a shortcut which runs the flow when I tap it.

I’ve published the final version of the flow to the Automate community so that you can download and adapt it however you see fit.

To help show you exactly how this works I’ve created a short video. I go into more detail on the flow I used, and you can see the whole thing in action.

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