Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can easily copy and paste between
all of your Apple devices.. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great
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So a great feature of all your Apple devices is their ability to copy and paste between
them. In other words you can Copy something on one device, like your iPad, and then Paste
it on your Mac. You don't have to do any additional steps for that. You copy on one device and
paste on the other. This is all part of the continuity set of features and actually part
of something called Handoff. Handoff is also the feature that allows you do things like
start writing an email or a document on one device and then just pick it up on another.
You can do this with just about anything you can copy like text, images, files. Let me
show you.
Let's look at one of those basic examples. Here I am on my iPad and I've selected some
text on a webpage. I'm going to tap it and Copy. Then here I am on my Mac and you could
see there's even a message coming up saying that something was being copied on the iPad
there. Now I'm going to go here and Paste. So I'm going to do Command V or I can do Edit,
Paste. You can see it pastes the exact text that I copied from my iPad. So that's the
simplest case. Just copy some text on your iPad or your iPhone and then you can paste
it here on your Mac.
You can, of course, do the opposite. I can select some text here. I'm going to do it
in Pages. I can do it in any app where I can copy text. I'm going to Command C or copy
that test. Then here on the iPad I'm going to paste that in. I'm going to paste it into
the Search field here. So I'll use the Paste command and you can see it pastes that text
right in there.
But you can go way beyond text. Pretty much anything that you can copy to the Clipboard
will work. So let's go and copy an image. I'm going to copy this image that's here and
then here on my Mac I can paste that in. So Command V just does the paste. I could have
copied it from my Photos app. I could have copied it from an image editing app. Here
I just copied it in Safari and then I was able to paste the image. So it works for text,
it works for images, it works for just about anything you can put into the copy buffer.
It can even work for files. As you probably already know you can Copy and Paste files
in the Finder on the Mac. But you can also Copy and Paste files between your devices.
So, here I am in a folder on my local drive. I've got a file here. I can copy that file
and then I can go over to my iPad. In the files app I'm looking at the local on my iPad
area there in the files app. So not in iCloud. I just tap in the middle of the screen and
you can see I've got Paste and I can paste there. There, the file is pasted. So this
gives you a way to quickly transfer files. And this isn't a small file. This is a 31
MB file here and I was able to put it onto my iPad or iPhone pretty easily using this.
This works on the iPhone just as easily with text and with images. Here with a file, again,
I'm going to Copy and again here on my iPhone, in the files app in a local folder not using
iCloud drive, I'm going to simply Paste and it will paste the file in there.
So here's also the same thing between two Macs. I've got my MacPro on my desktop and
my MacBook Pro here. I can copy this file here, Command C, and over here on my MacBook
Pro I can Paste and it will paste that file. It works, of course, with images, with text,
with anything in the Clipboard as well.
To get this working you've got to make sure that you have a few things turned on. First
of all you want to make sure that you've got Bluetooth turned on. You want to make sure
you have WiFi turned on as well. You want to make sure you have this feature turned
on which is under General in System Preferences. It's called Handoff. Allow Handoff between
this Mac and your iCloud devices. On your iPhone or iPad the settings for this are under
General, then you'll see AirPlay & Handoff. Make sure Handoff is turned on. Of course
also check for Bluetooth and check for WiFi.
Then, it goes without saying, that you have to be signed in with the same iCloud account
on all these devices. That's the key that links all these together is being signed in
with your Apple ID and your iCloud account.
Even if you have all of these things setup correctly some people report that they still
have trouble using this or it only works from one device to another and not the opposite
way. I've even run into situations where is just seems to stop working. What works for
me to get it working again is to simply turn Handoff Off and then turn it back on again.
Try that on each device. So it's a quick switch on and off. Other people say that they've
had to restart their machine entirely to get it going. Other people that say they can't
get it working at all. It goes without saying that you need to have a fairly recent Mac.
So if your Mac is eight years old or your iPad is seven years old and using an old version
of iOS it's probably not going to work.
As I showed you here it's super handy for transferring files. It's easier to use this
than it actually is to use AirDrop for transferring files. So I hope you get some use out of kit.
Thanks for watching!