# I built a Mac app to import Blackmagic Camera videos from my iPhone > Importer for Blackmagic Camera is my free, open source Mac app that copies Blackmagic Camera clips from an iPhone over USB, checks every copy byte for byte, and then offers to delete the originals. Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2026-10-06 | Topics: [News](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/news/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/importer-for-blackmagic-camera/ ![Importer for Blackmagic Camera, a Mac app that copies Blackmagic Camera videos from an iPhone to a Mac](https://flaviocopes.com/images/importer-for-blackmagic-camera/banner.png) I built Importer for Blackmagic Camera, a free and open source Mac app that copies the videos you record with [Blackmagic Camera](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagiccamera) on your iPhone to your Mac. Plug in the iPhone with a USB cable, see every clip with a thumbnail, play the ones you're not sure about, and import all of them or just a few. Here's how it works in 30 seconds: I shoot with Blackmagic Camera on my iPhone 16 Pro. In theory it can save each clip straight to the iPhone's photo library, but that setting never worked for me, so my clips stayed in Blackmagic Camera's own library. That's where the problem started. The clips are huge, and getting them out of there kept putting me in a weird situation. When I saved them to my photo library by hand or exported them, nothing told me when the export had finished, and the iPhone would lock itself in the middle of it. Then I didn't know whether the videos had made it to my library or not. Many of those videos are important to me, and I wasn't going to delete them from the phone on a guess. So I built this app to know for sure. It shows every clip and how far along its copy is, and a clip only counts as imported once the copy on the Mac matches the one on the iPhone. When I finally used it, I had 69 clips and 15 GB waiting in Blackmagic Camera. ## Checked byte for byte Every clip is copied into a hidden temporary file first, and flushed to disk. Then the app reads the file back from the disk, with the cache turned off, and computes its SHA-1 hash. The iPhone computes a hash too. The file protocol the Finder uses to talk to an iPhone has an operation that asks the iPhone for the SHA-1 of a file, computed from its own storage. It takes about a second per gigabyte, so the check doesn't need a second download. The copy gets the clip's real name and its recording date only when the two hashes match. Otherwise it's thrown away. ![The Importer for Blackmagic Camera window halfway through an import, with three clips imported and the fourth at 62%](https://flaviocopes.com/images/importer-for-blackmagic-camera/screenshot.png) When the import is done, the app asks whether to delete the clips from the iPhone. **Keep on iPhone** is the default button, so pressing Return never deletes anything. If you click **Delete from iPhone**, the app runs the whole check again, right before it deletes each clip: the copy has to still be there, have the same size as the iPhone's file, and the same hash. If anything doesn't match, that clip stays on the iPhone and an alert tells you why. It never overwrites a file either. Clips already in the folder are checked instead of copied again, and if a different file has the same name, the copy gets a new name, like `A001_02211024_C001 2.mov`. ## Preview before you copy Click a column to sort by name, recording date or size. Select a clip and press Space, or double-click it, and it plays straight from the iPhone. Nothing is saved to the Mac while you watch. This works because AVFoundation can play a video by asking for pieces of it, a byte range at a time, and the app reads just those ranges from the iPhone. Blackmagic Camera writes each clip's index at the end of the file. So a thumbnail of my largest clip, 1.4 GB, reads about 4 MB: the index and one frame. The thumbnails are cached on the Mac, so the list fills in instantly the next time. ## How it works macOS has a private framework called MobileDevice, the one the Finder uses to see your iPhone and its apps' files. The app loads it to find the iPhone on USB and to open Blackmagic Camera's Documents folder, the same folder the Files app shows under **On My iPhone**. If the iPhone never trusted your Mac, the app asks it to, so you unlock it, tap **Trust**, and the clips show up. From there it talks AFC, the iPhone's file protocol, on its own. That's what gives it the hash operation and the byte ranges for previews. MobileDevice ships with macOS, so the app works on any Mac with macOS 15 or later, no Xcode needed. A private framework can change with a macOS update, though, and it's the reason the app can't be on the Mac App Store. ## Before you use it Importer for Blackmagic Camera is my own project. It's not made by, affiliated with or endorsed by Blackmagic Design. It's provided as is, without warranty, under the MIT license. The app checks every copy before it offers to delete anything, but I'm not responsible for lost videos or damage to your devices. Keep a backup of footage you care about, and look at your copies before you delete the originals. It only sees the clips Blackmagic Camera keeps in its own storage. Clips it saved to Photos or to an external drive don't show up. The cable sets the speed. With a USB 2 cable, my imports run at about 40 MB/s. The 15 Pro and later Pro iPhones support USB 3, up to 10 Gb/s, and when one of them is connected at USB 2 speed, the app says so at the bottom of the window. ## Get it The code is on GitHub at [flaviocopes/importer-for-blackmagic-camera](https://github.com/flaviocopes/importer-for-blackmagic-camera), MIT licensed. Download `Importer-for-Blackmagic-Camera-1.2.0.zip` from the [latest release](https://github.com/flaviocopes/importer-for-blackmagic-camera/releases/latest), unzip it, and drag Importer for Blackmagic Camera to your Applications folder. It runs on macOS 15 Sequoia or later, on Apple silicon and Intel Macs. It's signed with my Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens like any other app you download. After that, the app [updates itself from GitHub](https://flaviocopes.com/mac-app-updates/). The [README](https://github.com/flaviocopes/importer-for-blackmagic-camera#readme) covers everything else.