[prehkugler]

It's important to ask yourself what you would do if you could AirDrop from your iOS device to an OS X device. Even though under the covers iOS and OS X work on files, iOS is sandboxed where OS X isn't, i.e. if you can't get to it via USB, you couldn't get to it via AirDrop anyway.

With that said, it would be useful to have some of the iTunes/iPhoto functionality for wireless(AirDrop) a la carte file transfer, but most people will just use iTunes wifi sync to get this effect.

[kalleboo]

> It's important to ask yourself what you would do if you could AirDrop from your iOS device to an OS X device

Quickly send photos I just took to put in email, IMs or on web forums. I used to do that constantly before I had an iPhone using Bluetooth, it was super-handy. Now I have to take a pointless long-cut through the internet with something like Dropbox. Royal pain when you're somewhere with spotty upstream internet.

[Terretta]

> Quickly send photos I just took to put in email, IMs or on web forums.

All the photos you just took are available via Photostream on all your other devices, assuming you have WiFi, which presumably you'd need for Dropbox. If you don't like firing up iPhoto or Aperture to see your photo stream on the desktop, there are "apps for that".

If you don't want an app, here's how to put a shortcut to your latest photos right on your dock:

http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57555169-285/access-your...

[kalleboo]

My iCloud account is already at data capacity (with a paid addon at that) with my iPhone and iPad backups. It's also a huge pain waiting for a million photos to sync when I want just this one. I'm also not happy with the privacy aspects of Photostream if I've taken private photos.

I mean, it works. But it's not elegant nor efficient. The Dropbox method sucks too. I often don't have Wifi (or it's hotel/airport wifi where you're limited to 1 device), and then I wish I was back on my dumbphone...

[Terretta]

> My iCloud account is already at data capacity...

Photostream doesn't count against iCloud capacity.

"Q. Does Photo Stream use my iCloud storage?"

"A. No. Photos uploaded to My Photo Stream or Shared Photo Streams do not count against your iCloud storage."

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4486

So the shared photo streams are effectively free photo album storage you can keep private or share with friends.

It also doesn't wait for a million photos to sync. It syncs the most recent one(s) you just took. It's hard to imagine more elegant or efficient than "it just happens without you doing anything".

It sounds like you're not very familiar with how Photostream really works. That's not unusual, a lot of my people I know complain about things that it turns out Photostream supports because Apple never really pushed or promoted it.

> I often don't have Wifi (or it's hotel/airport wifi where you're limited to 1 device), and then I wish I was back on my dumbphone...

You're in luck; iOS has a switch to turn off 3G data and become a dumb phone.

If you're in the mood for the dumb phone style manual management instead of an automatic photo stream , there are several really great apps for popping single photos over or sharing the clipboard. I personally use a clipboard app that I can "copy" a photo on the iOS device and on my Mac just "paste" it somewhere. That one works over ad-hoc WiFi so doesn't need a WiFi base. Others work over bluetooth.

[kalleboo]

I stand corrected on the Photo stream data thing. My experience with it is not that it syncs the recent ones first. My experience is they pop in randomly, then it stalls for half an hour for no reason. Maybe it's gotten better recently.

It's still ridiculous that the answer to "I want to send this thing between these two devices in front of me" is "I have to send every photo I take to a server owned by a company somewhere".

Clearly Apple agrees, or they wouldn't have created AirDrop in the first place!

[mietek]

> I personally use a clipboard app that I can "copy" a photo on the iOS device and on my Mac just "paste" it somewhere. That one works over ad-hoc WiFi so doesn't need a WiFi base. Others work over bluetooth.

This sounds brilliant. Is it Instashare?

[blub]

He said he wanted to send a photo to his Mac, not all his other devices, Apple and whoever else has acces to Apple's servers. AirDrop would have seemed like the logical solution.

[fredsted]

Even though iOS is sandboxed, has no files and no folders, lets not forget AirDrop on Mac doesn't do folders either. It almost looks like attachments: you drag (send) a file to the receiver. iOS handles mail attachments fine. I think this is something apple will implement later via software updates. Like for example obvious but long awaited OS X features like iBooks, Maps, Messages and Finder tabs. We're are wondering why they just didn't include it from the start, maybe they need a reason to sell OS X 10.10.

[prehkugler]

This seems like a possible win for Apple, and I hope they implement it. I just wanted to point out that OSX to iOS AirDrop is not as trivial as many people make it sound. There are edge cases, such as "what if the user doesn't have an app that supports this file?". It's different than email, because the file can't be saved in anyone's sandbox.

[r00fus]

Realistically it could be done a la DropBox - i.e., another app (lets call it AirDrop) that receives these files and can launch the App associated with the file. Users could send the file through AirDrop.app by sending that file to AirDrop.