Do you plug in your iPhone or iPad to sync with your Mac (or PC, you poor soul), then groan in dismay as the progress bar crawls toward the finish line? You don’t have to grin and bear it—with a few simple tweaks, you can reduce the time it takes to sync your iDevices with your computer. For starters, store as few photos as possible on the iPhone or iPad itself—in addition to freeing up valuable storage space, this speeds up syncing by trimming fat from the backup that iTunes makes before each sync.
Use discretion when you’re syncing.
Next, connect your device to your computer, launch iTunes, and select your iPhone or iPad on the left under Devices. This will display the Summary tab for your device, which has two powerful options: “Sync only checked songs and videos,” and “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC.” The first one lets you control what music, TV shows, and movies are synced to your device by checking and unchecking the tickbox next to each item in your library. That’s a whole lotta clicking, but you can speed up the process by holding down Command and group-selecting multiple songs or entire albums, then right-clicking and selecting Uncheck Selection from the pop-up menu.
The Summary tab controls the core decisions you can make about syncing.
All that manual unchecking can still be laborious, which is where the “Convert higher bit rate...” option comes in handy. It compresses your library and speeds up your syncing in one fell swoop by squishing the copies of your songs that are stored on your iDevice into 128kbps AAC files. (The original files on your computer aren’t affected.) Audiophiles might balk at that bit rate, but for most mobile listening, your music will sound just fine, and syncing will be zippier when copying over new tunes because the files will be substantially smaller.
With your device still selected in iTunes, click the tabs under the Apple logo in the top middle and cycle through Info, Apps, Ringtones, Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, Books, and Photos. Make sure you’re only syncing the content you really use on your device—each tab has an array of options for controlling what’s transferred to your device when you add new content of that type to your library. Explore them all—there’s a lot of powerful customization here.
The fewer photos you keep on your device, the faster syncing goes.
One of the best sync-savers? Keep podcasts to the latest two or three episodes; you can always go back and download specific episodes to listen to later.
