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baryon

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Oct 3, 2009
3,932
3,058
I know that I can specify a photos sync folder in iTunes that will sync with my iPhone. I also know I can configure iPhoto to sync. But that's not what I want. I want to be able to go like "hey, I have this awesome photo on my hard drive, and want to show it to someone on my iPhone, right now. I need to quickly get it onto there and leave. No cables, no waiting for anything else."

Syncing sucks because it starts to back up the whole iPhone, then it "transfers purchases" (whatever the hell that means), starts to transfer songs that are already on there anyway, and does a whole bunch of other useless stuff that takes literally about half an hour on WiFi which is ridiculous if all I want is to get a single, 250kb photo on there. Back in the 90's you could literally do this faster using a floppy disk.

Dropbox sucks because about 50% of the time it won't work, or it's glitchy and some photos simply refuse to load however long I leave them to load. Or they do load but the little loading circle in the center of the screen won't ever go away and it ruins the photo. It also sucks because I need to keep the photos on my Mac as well so that they stay on my iPhone. Why all the duplicates? I already have them on my Mac but not in Dropbox. I just want them on my iPhone without having to copy them elsewhere on my Mac.

Photo Stream sucks too, since it's unreliable and there's no way to know when and if it will transfer a given photo. Sometimes I'll take a photo and it won't ever appear in Photo Stream, while others will. Sometimes photos appear instantly, and other times they take days to show up. And there is no "refresh" button so it's useless.

Basically: How do I simply transfer one or more small JPEGs from my computer to my iPhone, within less than, say, 10 seconds, given they're on the same WiFi network?

Bonus question: How do I do the same from iPhone to Mac? Again, avoiding Dropbox, and avoiding, at all costs, Photo Stream, which is the worst thing I've ever seen. Right now I'm literally emailing photos to myself and I can't think of a better, faster way to do this. Am I really missing something?
 
Mac to iPhone - iMessage it to yourself. If you're running Yosemite beta, might be able to AirDrop.

iPhone to Mac - Image Capture
 
Ios 8 and Yosemite will support airdrop between different types of devices, doing exactly what you need. With Mavericks and ios7, AirDrop is Mac to Mac or ios to ios only.
 
For me, email to self is still the quickest and easiest way. Photostream scales down images. icloud Drive might be good for that in future if it lets you plce photos to a drive folder on iOS.
 
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