- Upload to a cloud storage service of your choice and download on the other end—Google Drive is very fast
- Use iCloud Photos (there’s client software for Windows too)
- Plug a cable in and drag and drop like it’s any other digital camera
- Create a Windows SMB network share (or Samba on other platforms), connect to it from Files, and use the share menu from Photos to put it in the network share
Yeah, this rarely works. It takes a long time to acknowledge there's any files, and then it tries to copy them, and then crashes instead. Over and over. Turning off the mechanism that autoconverts image files from HEIC to JPG helps (I never tried JUST video files, but those are unreliable either way in my experience). Obnoxious, overall.
Now I see in the comment above that cables often don't work.
I wonder if there're apps for saving files to USB memories
I think you can transfer photos and videos for free using a usb cable as well. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/import-photos-an...
I don’t even consider it an ‘option’ anymore while transferring files. I’ll just upload it to my server, since I know - by default - even on the same wifi network, AirDrop is as useful as picking a number in your head and having a friend guess it.
I can’t honestly think of a regular ‘service’ on iOS and MacOS that is as fundamentally broken as AirDrop. I’m not sure what’s so complicated about writing a device to device file sharing service, but - for instance - I just tried to share a file from my Mac to my iPhone. Didn’t work; don’t see my iPhone. Same wifi network - no firewall; no filters. This is a majority of the time.
Although I agree with general sentiment. I used to have android phone and I really enjoyed that you could just connect your phone with cable and browser data with any file manager.
I always have a bad mood when I have to download/upload/sync something via itunes, e.g. voice recordings / pdf / documents / ebooks
But yes, Apple should have made it easier.
Take getting videos off an iPhone for instance, something I have to do many times a week in my job.
If you have AirDrop it's effortless. But my MBP has a faulty bluetooth chip so bluetooth generally stops working after the machine has been running a few hours so I need to reboot every time I move videos from my phone to my machine.
Are there alternatives? Nope not really, moving iPhone videos to a PC, Which most video editing workstations are now because Apple neglected or fumbled the high end for close to a decade. You can't AirDrop so what do you do?
- WhatsApp? Nope has a 60 meg limit - Slack? Nope, for some reason trying to send video files 90% of the time stalls or just takes close to 20 minutes. I think they have some built in throttling to prevent my using their service as a AirDrop-drop in because airdropping then sending the same video from desktop is fast - Email? Nope, files are too big
Only real solutions are AirDropping to a Mac then sending on slack or over network or trying to figure out how to do it over the network via the Files app which is also slow and weird.
All that beautiful interoperability goes from being a benefit to actually making the product look bad the second it can't just interoperate with things you need to get your work done.
End of the day they can't do everything and are unwilling to create machines that are competitive in these niche areas but once you're in this niche the whole Apple philosophy starts to look like a bad one.
All it would take would be for them to release an AirDrop for Windows app which would make their platform look better, I'm still your customer even when I have to send a file to a Windows machine Apple... not providing that feature isn't making Windows look bad because the reason I'm there in the first place is because it outperforms even a $20K Mac Pro.