You’ll Kick Yourself For Not Knowing This iPhone Trick

iOS can do so many things, it’s easy to ignore features you don’t use that often (especially if you didn’t even know about them in the first place). There is, however, one incredibly useful, time-saving iOS tool that has popped back into our lives: AirDrop. It lets you share photos, videos, contacts, and content from apps to nearby iOS and Mac users.  We take lots of photos and screenshots that we use for articles, so AirDrop is a great daily tool to move those photos from our iPhones to our Macs super quickly. You can use AirDrop to send files or photos to coworkers in-office or at an event; at a dinner or party, you could use it to share with friends. And, it’s so easy to use. First, on your iPhone, make sure WiFi and Bluetooth are switched on; then, swipe up from the bottom of the screen to pull up the Control Center. Below the music controls, tap AirDrop. There, you can choose to turn AirDrop off, make your device discoverable to your Contacts, or make your device discoverable to anyone. If you want to share things from a Mac, go to the Finder (in the lower left of your screen), select AirDrop, and choose whether your Mac can be discovered by contacts only or anyone. From there, you can tap the file you want to share and then tap the "share" icon in the lower left-hand corner. Nearby AirDrop users appear in that AirDrop field, and you can select one to send to (on a Mac, just drag and drop a file into the AirDrop window on your screen). From there, the recipient gets a notification to save or decline the file — a step that’s skipped if you’re already iCloud contacts with one another. Photos, webpages from Safari, and even new apps you want a friend to download from the App Store can be shared in a split second. No more copy/pasting and no more emailing yourself photos. (It’s often faster than sharing something over iMessage, too.) As long as you have an iPhone or iPad that can run iOS 7 or iOS 8, and a Mac running OS X Yosemite (you can check this under the Apple menu, in About This Mac), you can take advantage of AirDrop. It works best when you’re within about 30 feet of your recipient — whether that’s your own Mac or a colleague’s iPhone — and, while you don’t need to be connected to a WiFi network, both devices do need to have WiFi switched on for files to send.  If you’ve never tried AirDrop before, give it a whirl. We promise you’ll kick yourself for all the time you spent emailing yourself photos (we sure did).