Share Photos Between iPhones With AirDrop

If you take a photo of someone with your iPhone and they have an iPhone too, you can immediately share the photo with them using AirDrop. To use AirDrop, you don't need to be on the same Wi-Fi network or have set up anything in advance. The photo sent is the full resolution image. This can be easier than exchanging phones to take pictures of each other or trying to take the same photo twice.

Video Transcript: Here's one of my favorite features of the iPhone. Say you're with a bunch of people that have iPhones. You're on vacation, you're at a party, whatever. You can take a picture of yourself, I'll going to take one right here. A still selfie. Now I can go into the camera roll there and see it and I can send it to somebody. Now this would be useful if you were taking a picture of somebody else. 
So you take a picture of them and now you're like, Hey, do you want this picture. Like right now. Not let me message it to you later. Send you an email or we'll synch some other way. I'm talking about sending it to them even though you're not on the same wifi network or maybe no wifi network at all. You're not going to send a compressed version over messages or anything like that. 
You're just going to use the AirDrop feature. How do you do that? Well, you're going to go ahead and when you're looking at the photo here, say this is the photo of the other person, you hit the Share button at the top, select the photo you want to share, hit Next and then the option at the top is AirDrop. It's going to come up with anybody nearby that's got AirDrop enabled. You can have it enabled in different ways. I'll show you that in a second. But right now I'm going to choose, there's Gary's iPhone 7plus. I'm going to choose that and on my 7plus I'm going to get an image there. I'm going to accept it and now it adds it to my Photo Library. It's just as if I took the photo. So instead of exchanging cameras and saying here take my camera and take a picture of me, you can have your friend take a picture of you with their camera and then immediately and quickly AirDrop the photo to you. Very useful. Not just for taking pictures of each other but they take a perfect shot of something and you're like, hey I want a copy of that. That person can send it to you.
So you've probably got AirDrop on by default. To check it swipe up from the bottom of the screen to bring up the Control Center. Then you're going to see AirDrop. Here it says Contacts only. If you tap that you can set it to Receiving Off, Contacts Only, or Everyone. Now assuming your friends are already in your Contacts, that means their Apple ID is in your Contacts, then you can have Contacts Only on and they'll be able to send stuff to you. If they have Contacts Only on, and you're in their Contacts, you can send stuff to them. 
But if for some reason they're not or maybe it's not working because you don't have the same email address for them that they're registered with, then you can just switch to Everyone. I recommend only doing this temporarily. You can see how easy it is for me to get to the settings. So you can switch to Everyone for a little while and then later on you can switch back to Contacts Only or Receiving Off if you prefer. But make sure that's on.
Now if something else needs to be changed in your settings then you're going to get different things here. Basically by default settings just by having Bluetooth and WiFi enabled then you should have AirDrop available.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Share Photos Between iPhones With AirDrop”

June Randall

6 years ago

This feature is tremendous. Thank you for teaching me about it. I will definitely be using it in the future.

Nancy

I just got my first iPhone and have sent pictures to my iMac. Picture gets sent and something flashes on my iMac screen that shows a picture has arrived and the little window disappears before I can press "view". Getting really frustrated because I can't
find the pictures I have sent.New to using Air Drop.

Gary Rosenzweig

Nancy: If this is your iPhone and your Mac, then instead of using AirDrop you would want to either transfer the files by connecting your phone to your Mac with the cable, running the Photos app, and then importing the photos. Or, use iCloud Photo Library on both devices to make it all automatic. AirDrop is great for sending photos to someone else, but not really for sending to yourself. BTW, those AirDrop photos are probably going to your Downloads folder.

Thank you so, so much. I found the photos in downloads and connected phone to iMac.
So simple and many, many thanks.

Comments Closed.

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information