Apple’s totally earned that whole “it just works” thing…except when it comes to getting photos on and off your iDevices. Quite frankly, it doesn’t work well at all unless you know your way around a less-than-obvious app or two. Fortunately, they’re super-easy to use, and once you get acquainted with them, you’ll wonder why you mucked around with anything else.
iTunes, you suck at photo management. Yup, we said it!
iTunes is supposed to be mission control for your iPhone and iPad when they’re connected to your Mac…so how come the only option iTunes offers for downloading your iDevice pics to your Mac is syncing libraries across devices? The answer might surprise you—it’s because every Mac ships with an app that handles this task so painlessly you’ll want to give it a bear hug. Called Image Capture, it lives in your Applications folder, and this lean, mean little app is a master at moving photos. To begin using it, connect your iDevice to your Mac, and if you have iTunes, iPhoto, or Aperture set to auto-launch or sync, sit tight until that’s all done.
Now launch Image Capture, select your device in the sidebar at the top left, and check out how quickly it loads a thumbnail of every photo and video on your device. From here, there’s a handful of key features you need to know. The Import and Import All buttons in the bottom right copy your photos and videos to whatever destination you select in the Import To dropdown (options there include iPhoto, Aperture, the Pictures folder, Desktop, and more). You can also just drag-and-drop pics from Image Capture to any location.
Bonus tip: You can also use Image Capture to import pics via USB or FireWire from any camera, card reader, and so on that is listed as Mac-compatible by its manufacturer.
When you’re done, use the Delete button (the red circle-with-slash at the bottom) to clear off your connected device—it’s ridiculously fast, and it frees up disk space and reduces sync times.
This powerful pop-up chooses what app launches when you connect a device.
Before you quit Image Capture, check out the popup named “Connecting this iPhone/iPad opens” because it can tame your Mac’s tendency to automatically open loads of apps when you plug in iDevices, cameras, and so on. This popup controls what app OS X launches when one of those devices is connected, and it lets you specify a different option for each device. Settings range from opening no application (sweet relief!) to auto-launching Image Capture, iPhoto, Aperture, or any application (which can even include an Automator routine) that you select using the Other option. Yup, control is a good thing…
CameraSync automatically sends your photos up to the cloud.
A good Image Capture setup smokes iTunes’ photo syncing, but for two bucks, you can do even better. Spend it on an iOS app called CameraSync ($1.99, universal)—it automatically uploads your iPhone and iPad pics and videos to Dropbox, Box.net, Amazon S3, iDisk, Flickr, or an FTP. Just launch the app every time you’ve snapped a new batch of photos, then leave it running in the background so it can automatically upload your latest pics. It doesn’t compress them at all, and it remembers which shots it’s uploaded so there’s no duplication. From there, you can copy the pics from your cloud service of choice to your Mac—or even to another iDevice if, say, you like to send your iPhone vids over to iMovie for iPad for a little bigger-screen editing.
We set CameraSync to upload pics from every iDevice we own to iDisk, then copy them to our Mac whenever it’s convenient.
