Is your phone covered by AppleCare? If not, check the Apple forums, they're very active and if you don't find your answer, you can ask for help.

Yes, it is covered by AppleCare, and, I'm currently looking at an Apple forum, but no answers yet.

This may or may not help you, but to get my cellphones' file system to show on my win10 PC file-explorer, I have to make sure they have "active" screens on before plugging into the PC, and then a menu comes up on the phones to charge, transfer files, etc and then choose transfer files. I have to do it this way every time.

I had several problems:

1. Apple had updated iOS beyond 14.8

2. The iCould application on my Windows 10 computer had been updated and I had to download the new one from the Microsoft store.

bengz6 - I think I did that, but after these two updates, I'll try again. I did see the phone as a drive on my computer, but when I clicked on one I got the message above.

Did you contact AppleCare support?

Yes, thanks to your reminder!

Well, although the iCloud problem was solved, the direct copying still doesn't work properly. It was working properly in July, and my most recent files are dated 7/29/2021. And the folders are all named year_month, so those files are in the 2021_07 folder. When I tried today, all the folders are either 100APPLE, 101APPLE, or 101ICLOUD through 108ICLOUD and are all dated 12/31/1969. And, when I started copying, the pictures showed up but suddenly they were icons only.???

The name of the folders and their dates don't matter. Are you describing how the images appear in WIndows Explorer, or how they look when you click on one of the files and open them using a photo viewing program to open them?

What is the size of each file shown to be, approximately? If you can't see, click on one of the folders in the left column, then at the top, change to View, Details. Then right click on one of the files, and choose Open in the dropdown menu. What happens, what do you see?

The JPEGs are about 5 MB, the movies are up to 400MB. And, the problem is (was), they wouldn't appear as images in Explorer. I'm now downloading 3 months worth from iCloud to my hard drive. It's VERY slow. 75 files, about 11GB total.

So when you went to the folders, they were empty? No Files? If so, they didn't transfer from the phone or went somewhere else.

If you can get them another way, that should solve the problem.

OK major improvement! I updated my iPhone12 from iOS 15 to 15.1! That seems to have solved the problem.

Before (like 3 months ago), when I would plug the phone into the computer's USB port using the charging cable, the folders would have names like 2021_07, which would contain all the photos and movies taken in July 2021.

Then the behavior reverted to their older format, like 101APPLE or 101CLOUD. That was the situation when I was trying to copy the folders from the phone to the computer via the USB cord. It started working, but suddenly stopped, with nothing copied, and the photos were unviewable. Since I now had updated iCloud on my computer, I tried copying them from there to my hard drive. It worked, but was very slow. I guess what I see on the iCloud folder on my computer are only links, not the actual files, which accounts why this process was so slow (see my comments two posts up).

Now, after the iOS update, the folders had a new naming format, 202107_, and the photos and movies were viewable and copyable via the USB cord. I'm now going to do an thorough file comparison between the various copied files using a great file comparison program called Beyond Compare 4.

I'm glad it got resolved. Stuff like this happens from time to time, unexplainable odd and undesirable behaviors that can be impossible to diagnose, much less fix.