- Hey I'm Jerry and if you're like me
and trying to work more from your iOS devices
then you might be wondering how to perform certain tasks
on iOS that you do without even thinking
on a laptop or desktop.
Well in today's video, I'm going to show you four ways
to transfer files between two iOS devices.
(soft music)
Let's start with what is probably the most difficult way
to transfer files between iOS devices
and that's with a USB drive.
So if this is all new to you, you mind be thinking,
"Jerry, how can a USB drive connect
to an iPad or an iPhone? It's got USB
when the iPhone has Lightning
and the iPad has either Lightning or USB-C."
Well that's where dongles come in.
For this transfer, I'm going to be using a Lightning
to USB cable and a USB-A to USB-C adapter.
Now one thing to know quickly is that
not all USB drives are made the same.
Some require more power and may or may not work
with your iPhone directly.
If that's the case, you might have to find a USB drive
with external power or you can use something
like a microSD card reader, which would work as well
and require less power.
So first thing I'm gonna do is,
is I'm going to connect my USB-A to USB-C adapter
onto this USB drive like that and insert it into the iPad.
When you insert the USB drive, it's going to show up
on the left side of the Files app.
I'm going to be copying some files
from this Local Temp folder here
and I'm going to hit Select, Select the items, and hit Move.
Over here, I'm going to Select the USB drive and hit Copy.
You can see the progress of the file copy up here,
although it's very limited.
So now we have the files actually on the USB drive
and we're going to take that out
and plug that into the iPhone.
Of course, since the iPhone doesn't have USB,
we're gonna use this USB-C to Lightning adapter
and plug it in that way.
So as you can see,
now on the iPhone we have the USB drive attached.
We can go in here and see the files that we've copied over.
We're gonna Select those. We're gonna do the same thing.
We're gonna hit the little File button at the bottom
and we're gonna Select the location where we want it,
which is going to be on my iPhone
and I'm going to select Local Temp again and Copy.
Now if we go to that folder on the iPhone,
you'll see the files exist there as well.
All right so the next way that we're gonna get files
from one device to another is using iCloud.
And to do that, we're just going
to download an image from Safari.
So here we have an image of Earth,
we're going to long press down here,
click Download Linked File, then we can see it here.
If we go back to the Files app,
it's gonna show up in our Downloads folder.
Now this Download folder's actually sitting
on iCloud already, so if you go to iCloud drive, Downloads,
here's the exact same folder.
Which means that any device that you're signed in
with iCloud will also get the exact same files.
So let's look on the iPhone.
So on the iPhone, if we go back to Browse
and go to Downloads,
right there we have Earth.whatever, png file.
Although you'll see the little Cloud icon over here
on the side, that means that it's in iCloud drive,
it's just not downloaded to the device.
If you want to download it to the device,
you just Tap and there it goes.
Now the file lives on both devices.
Now you can also do this with files that already exist
on the iPad or iPhone but you have to account
for the upload times if it's a large file to iCloud
and then the download to the new device.
Now this also works with other cloud services,
like OneDrive or Google Drive
or even Adobe Creative Cloud files
if that's something you use.
However, I have seen some issues with OneDrive,
for example, where I upload a file on one device
and it takes quite a long time for it to show up
as even being available on the other one.
The third way that we can transfer files from one device
to another is using AirDrop.
If we look at that same Earth.png file that we used before,
I'm going to Tap and Hold, and then I'm going to hit Share,
and then over here on AirDrop,
you're going to see a couple of devices.
I'm going to send it to my iPhone
and right away the iPhone's gonna grab it
and because it's a picture file,
it's going to open up Photos directly.
So this copied it directly into the Photos application
because of the file type that it is,
instead of putting it inside the Files application,
maybe inside of a folder that you wanted to.
We're going to do the same thing
with this LumaFusion Backup File.
We're going to long press and hit Share,
going to go into AirDop, and going to tap on My Phone.
We're going to wait for the file to transfer,
on the iPhone it's going to copy over
and because of the file type, open up LumaFusion.
Now this is a great fast easy way to transfer files
between devices but what if you don't want it
to go directly into the Photos app
or open up in a specific applications.
Well, now, you can copy and paste as well between devices.
If we look at that same LumaFusion file,
which opened up automatically
when we transferred it over to the iPhone.
We're going to do this a little bit different.
We're just going to Tap and Hold and click Copy
and now because of the way the handoff works inside iOS,
we can just go to the iPhone,
navigate to the directory we want to use,
find an empty space and Tap and Hold and hit Paste.
And as you can see, the file, just like with AirDrop,
is copying directly over from the iPad
to the iPhone using WiFi.
However, this time the file does not automatically open up
in the application that it's designated for
and you can place it wherever you want
within the file system.
So that's the four ways that I know of to copy files
between iOS devices: a USB drive, Cloud services,
AirDrop and Copy-Paste.
So if this video was helpful
and helps your iOS productivity,
let me know with a thumbs up.
If I missed something or there's a completely easier way
to do this, that I didn't even mention,
then let me know in the comments below.
You can follow me on Twitter @JerrySchulze for video updates
and I'll see you next time.