AirDrop

I really like AirDrop in iOS. It's an efficient, fast, secure method of transferring a photo from the iPhone to the Mac. With the phone near the computer, select the picture, tap the share icon, designate the destination from the choices list, and send. It shows up immediately in the Downloads folder. Do all computers and phones do that?

Since I use the iPhone for blog illustrations (which are only 800 pixels wide) and things like eBay sale illustrations, it's convenient and easy.

Can people do this with a "real" camera? Are there any cameras that allow you to use AirDrop or something like it? I'm really not an expert about anything computer-related. Quite the opposite really. You do know I write these posts in quill pen and India ink first, right? As you might expect I have strong opinions about what kind of goose feathers make the best pens.

I can't believe I'm complaining, given all I used to do to develop film. But it's not as easy to transfer a file from the SD card, especially when I just want one in a hurry. I know Fuji has an app called PC Autosave, but I don't think it's compatible with Big Sur.

I'm mainly just curious here. It's not a necessity for me personally.

Anyway, here is the "new technique" version of the phone picture I posted this morning, that is, X-H1, square, with the wide lens:

Not sure it looks any better than the picture I posted, writ small like this.

I wonder what focal length the 14mm lens on the Fuji X-H1 would equate to on a 56mm square piece of film in a Rollei or a Hassie? I'll have to figure that out in the morning.

Mike 

Books o' the Week

Nikon fan are ya? Nikon: A Celebration by British automotive writer and Nikon collector Brian Long covers the history of the company from its beginnings to the end of the film era. A U.S. parallel with more concentration on opinions about the equipment is B. Moose Peterson's Nikon System Handbook. The 6th Edition covered film equipment up to 2000. <—These are portals to Amazon.com thru TOP; you can also search for Nikon books from The Book Depository, which offers free shipping worldwide.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Curt Gerston: "AirDrop is outrageously good. I teach photography and video in a middle school iMac lab, and AirDrop allows my students to do a lot of work on their phones outside of class, and then easily drop their stuff onto the Macs and start using Photoshop and/or iMovie or whatever. From a classroom management point of view, Airdrop is heavenly."

Stéphane Bosman: "Slightly less than 49mm, so that’s like using a 50mm on a Hasselblad, which is a classic wide angle focal length in medium format. Is this a coincidence or did someone at Fuji plan this?"

Soeren Engelbrecht: "The equation is relatively simple: Your Fuji sensor is 15.6mm tall, compared to 56mm for a 6x6 negative. Comparing focal length relative to negative size, the equivalent focal length for your 14mm lens is then 14/15.6*56 = 50mm. The other day, I did a similar calculation for the Sigma 65mm lens on 'squared' full-frame: 65/24*56= 152mm—or the classic portrait focal length.

"Hope this helps—and no, I won't start talking equivalent apertures.  :-)  "

Mike replies: Thanks for doing that for me guys, and that's interesting. I had a 50mm once for the Mamiya 6, and I liked it but for the slow maximum aperture of ƒ/4, which, along with the ISO of 250 at which I shot Tri-X 400, just created too many limitations for general shooting.

Dogman: "Re: 'Not sure it looks any better than the picture I posted, writ small like this.' Much better, for me. A cleaner image and the square format works very well."

Speed: "Canon, Sony, Hasselblad et al. make cameras. Apple makes a photographic ecosystem. Canon, Sony, Hasselblad et al. take better pictures (for some value of 'better') but Apple makes its pictures more usable."

Dan Khong: "AirDrop is good. I did not know until you shared. I learned how to use it in a few minutes. Many thanks."

Daniel Speyer: "I had commented on the two pictures and then erased it as this kind of critique is your forté, but then looking at them the later one is sooo much better IMO, I will comment. The two bushes were fighting for attention. Also the tops of the trees are now there. So now it is lovely (again IMO)."

Thom Hogan: "Apple's unique superpower is that it controls everything in its ecosystem. Thus, they are about the only ones that can do this sort of thing (apparently you haven't discovered Handoff yet  ;~) . The problem from the camera standpoint is that they all can do something, but not at the level that Apple can. For instance, Nikon's SnapBridge can push files over to the phone/tablet easily, but not to your Mac at the same time or the same way. You could, I suppose, SnapBridge to the phone and AirDrop to the Mac, but that requires a manual step in between (has anyone figured out how to do that with Shortcuts yet?). Canon tries to get around this by having you push images to their cloud and then having the cloud send them where you want them, but it's a little kludgey and subject to problems when someone changes their API."

Comments

[Stéphane Bosman]

Slightly less than 49mm, so that’s like using a 50mm on an Hasselblad, which is a classic wide angle focal length in medium format. Is this a coincidence or did someone at Fuji plan this?

[Grant]

Apple's AirDrop is Apple's way of preparing you for they day that they remove all the ports from their products.

Panasonic's Image App allows you to control the camera from your phone and to upload the image to the phone or the Cloud. You can transfer files from the phone to the computer via Bluetooth. I have only done it once, transfer via card reader works fine for me.

I like the joy of discovering six month old images on the SD card. It's like the forgotten roll of unprocessed film that you discover in your sock drawer.

[Bill Tyler]

Well, I like both versions. How about a print sale?

[Martin Doonan]

AirDrop is something that works because of the closed Apple ecosystem. Combinations of transfer I've tried and my experience:
Apple to non-Apple (PC or Android): fiddly, Bluetooth is the best bet
Android to PC: easy with a cable, can be easy on home network (if you can set it up) or fiddly as above
Non-Apple to Apple: forget it.

[Christer Almqvist]

I can send picture files from my Sony A7R3 to my MacBook Pro almost as easily as with Air Drop from my iPhone. I mainly shoot RAW with my Sony so these large files take a bit longer to transfer than is the case with the iPhone files.

I probably once paired up the Sony and the Mac, but that was years ago and I have forgotten if it was difficult or not. Probably not, but involved feeding the WiFi PW to the camera.

For transfer of a large number of RAW shots, it is quicker to use a cable or a card reader, but a little bit more cumbersome to set up.

[RubyT]

I have an Android phone and a PC, but I use Google Drive much the same way. It's very easy and practical. Once or twice I've had my Fuji transfer files to my phone so I can do this, but normally I just take a quick phone shot for people I'd want to share with immediately and handle the proper files later at my leisure.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

That’s a lovely, serene image, Mike. I can just hear the silence of the spring bloom momentarily placed on pause by a last snowy gasp of winter. (Careful, man. You’re in danger of becoming a skilled color photographer! 😧)

I love AirDrop, too. But getting images directly from a camera to, say, your phone remains a bit clunkier since the camera isn’t using iOS. Since I’m not a social media addict I admittedly may be behind the times with this observation.

[David Hamilton]

Canadian author https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Johnston_(writer) Wayne Johnston told a few years back, that he write his novels longhand, so.....

[Alex Mercado]

Many real camera manufacturers offer dedicated phone/tablet apps, that will connect to the camera's WiFi, for JPEG transfers and remote camera control. I use OI.Share with my OM-D.

[Bill Tyler]

The bit about quill pens reminds me of an Isaac Asimov story where the protagonists are astonished to learn that they can do arithmetic with a pencil. As I recall (perhaps inaccurately) his inspiration came from going on a cruise without his typewriter, and finding that he was able to write stories in longhand.

[Hugh]

Anything I shoot - stills or video - with my Samsung phone is automatically uploaded to my OneDrive account, and it’s then immediately available on any of my PCs, laptops or iPad. Wasn’t too difficult to set up.

Modern Canons can be set up the same way. Others as well I expect.

[Robert Pillow]

Nice picture!

[Dave]

As someone who learned about computers before the IBM PC was sold, I'm happy with the memory cards in the camera. If I wanted to send something by phone, I'd take a crummy picture with the phone and send it.

The 36 MP photos from the Pentax K1 II are much too big to consider transferring via wi-fi or other "non-wired" method.

We wrote our first programs in BASIC, so the computer and software makers can go right ahead and spend their time writing "new and improved" programs that are much more complex than those I'd be interested in writing.

I would love to be able to drop off a memory card with a selection of digital images and receive the "old-fashioned" paper prints that are automatically color-corrected like the big film printing machines did. My 35mm film prints have lasted more than 20 years, so I'm happy with the longevity. (Those old printing machines cost around $100,000 back in the day, IIRC.)

Thank goodness the digital images from my camera turn out fine for the most part. Transferring the files from the camera's cards to the computer is enough computer work for me. I very rarely fiddle with color or brightness settings of the digital images.

Transferring files to the computer is the only part of digital photography that I detest.

[John Nollendorfs]

So much simpler if you just have Google back up all your phone photos. The they are available on Google photos on any PC. Also, easy to share your selected photos without having to send the file, only a link to your "Google photos".

[Vijay]

I'm a PC person, but this post reminded me that wirelessly transferring RAW files from my Canons to my hard drives has eliminated the possibility that my camera could be card-less. Far too often, I used to forget and leave the SD card in a reader attached to the PC. Thankful to be rid of that problem.

[Sandeep Sidhu]

Airdrop (& Handoff) are just the best. Now if they would only give you more granular controls over who can & cannot send you files, it would be just the bestest.

The closest you'll get with the Fuji is to use the Fujifilm Cam Remote to transmit the photos from your Fuji camera to your iPhone & then Airdrop the photos to your Mac from there.

[Rob de Loe]

The Mamiya G 50mm f/4 you used to use is one of the orphan lines of the photography world. It's *almost* impossible to use the wonderful Mamiya G lenses on other cameras because adapters do not exist.

I'm using the Mamiya G 50/4 on my Fuji GFX and it's a superb lens -- very warm, but wonderful from wide open. Using Mamiya G lenses on a GFX requires some extensive modifications, but is worth the effort.

[Paul Kelly]

Air Drop is a great idea, but unfortunately like a few other Apple ideas it often does not work. Wonderful when it does, but I usually find it quicker to put the files in Dropbox, wait for them to upload to the Dropbox server, then download from the server to the second device. Often I can wait longer than that process for the second device to show up on Air Drop.

[Caleb Courteau]

I have an Olympus OMD that has wifi built in. I can connect it to my iPhone (which has the Olympus app installed) and directly transfer photos from my camera to my phone. At first I thought of it as a gimmick but now it’s one of my favorite features, to the point that I wouldn’t want to own a camera without it. No, it’s not as slick as Airdrop, but it’s a quick and dirty way to share and view my photos.

[John Camp]

I use memory cards plugged into a card-reader. Probably costs me as much as a minute or two of my precious time to transfer them.

[Thomas Rink]

This is a lovely picture, Mike! But for me, the 4/3 version works better. Reason: The yellow flowers from the shrub on the very left (a forsythia?) somehow overpower the magenta flowers of the bigger shrub in the center, skewing the balance of the composition to the left. In the 4/3 version, the magenta shrub is off center to the right, so that the visual weight of the shrubs is better balanced. I also like how the two branches on the left intrude into the frame, to emphasize that the picture is just a snippet of a bigger environment.

If it were mine, I'd be curious how it looked like if the yellows were made just a bit lighter?

Congratulations!
Thomas

[Dori]

AirDrop is so easy a stranger could do it :)

I guess be careful with your settings.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/06/why-teens-try-airdrop-you-memes-concerts/591064/

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/iphone-airdrop-hack

[Dan westergren]

I used to joke that airdrop worked great except when you really needed it. Fine for horsing around and having fun sending pictures to unsuspecting family members across the room. But, as soon as you decided to rely on it for some professional, mission critical use it would mysteriously stop working. I will admit though that it is much better than when it was first introduced.

[Lesley T]

Thank you, thank you, thank you for getting me to try Air Drop! It is so, so easy and fast!! Sorry about all the exclamation marks, but that's exactly how I feel about discovering and trying it. No more emailing myself pictures from my phone and then downloading and saving them as I made muttering noises about there just having to be an easier way to do it. There is!

[Oskar Ojala]

I now and then send pictures from my Sony camera to my iPhone so that I can share them easily. It works pretty well, though I suspect it works better with an Android phone, since those allow a bit more freedoms for 3rd party apps. I only really use Airdrop for transferring between two i-devices.

[David Bennett]

What am I missing?

Are the photos on your iPhone not already in your Photos application on your Mac?

[Well, I had never actually *opened* Photos until I read your comment, but when I did, there indeed were all my iPhone pictures--up to 2015. I probably could figure out how to get the rest to load with a little sleuthing. --Mike]

[JimH]

Air Drop is a neat feature, but if you use Apple Photos the transfer is easier for large numbers of photos.
Funny you should mention eBay. I got a message I though was spam telling me that I if I wanted to continue using eBay, I would have to quit using PayPal and give them my bank account information. At first I thought it was a phishing/malware email, but with some checking it turned out to be real! https://www.imrg.org/blog/why-ebay-drops-paypal/
Give eBay my banking information? Who are they kidding? With all the hacks going down now, I certainly am not trusting eBay with my banking information!
That turned out to be the last straw for eBay. All. the film equipment I bought from them was badly misrepresented and I've had other bad experiences buying and selling.
I cancelled my eBay account yesterday.
Mike, your experience with eBay has been not so good either, eh?
Of course, I guess CraigsList makes eBay look OK, but I'm getting tired of what I now call IoT - the Internet of Thieves.

[Thomas Mc Cann]

Oh for an alternative to ebay and paypal. I sold some earphones recently and was paid £107 for them, between fees and currency rip off I got £91. Outrageous

[Matt Haber]

Unfortunately, today Air Drop has been found to have a major security risk:

https://gizmodo.com/airdrop-security-flaw-exposes-1-5-billion-apple-devices-1846747548