Claim a library on the other phone

The point of a claim is not “faster than a cable.” It is “not through Apple’s or Google’s photo product.” Vendor switch tools lock you back into an ecosystem and pick a compression policy you cannot turn off.

What claim means

The old device wrote a key layout. The new device reads the same schema. USB uses .album/manifest.jsonl; object storage uses the index/ manifest. After a claim, the new phone can list those resources in the backed-up library. The on-device camera roll stays empty until you download.

Android cannot line iOS local_identifier values up with MediaStore. Favorites and similar local flags do not travel. That is an identity-space mismatch, not a forgotten feature.

Order that has actually worked

1. Old phone backup until pending is 0.
2. Spot-check twenty stills, one 4K video, one Live Photo pair.
3. Install Azalea on the new phone. Add the same profile. Do not create a look-alike bucket.
4. Claim. For USB, plug the disk before opening the profile so probe can see it.
5. Compare item count and bytes before you delete anything on the old phone.

The switch-day checklist has the rollback: do not wipe the old phone because a claim looked blank for ten minutes.

One real miss

2 Apr 2026, Pixel 8 → iPhone 16 via S3. One of 406 videos was a leftover broken MP4 from an older Android; the hash did not match and it stayed unrecoverable. Seven other failures were Wi-Fi idle kills and retried. Failed ≠ lost.