Today’s Question: When getting others to send me photos from their iPhone, they love to use iMessage; which is very low quality. What do you recommend for a process that is easy for non-photographers to use and yields the best quality?
Tim’s Quick Answer: I consider AirDrop to be the best option for sharing original media (including photos) between Apple devices (including iOS or macOS).
More Detail: There are a wide variety of options for sharing photos between devices, but when you want the original file (rather than a reduced-resolution JPEG for example) and both sender and receiver are Apple devices, I think AirDrop is the best approach.
The minor caveat with AirDrop is that the security settings default to only being able to receive content from someone who is in your Contacts list if using a mobile device. So, if you’re sharing with someone who doesn’t have you in their Contacts, they’ll need to change that setting first. To do so, go to the Settings app on the mobile device and choose General followed by AirDrop. At the top of the AirDrop page choose “Everyone for 10 Minutes”.
The sender can then go to the Photos app and either open the single photo they want to share or choose “Select” at the top-right and then tap on each photo to be shared. Then tap the Share button (the icon is a rectangle with an arrow pointing upward) and choose AirDrop from the popup that appears. Then tap the name of the device to share with, and the recipient will be notified with an option to accept.
Once they accept, the recipient can find the images in the Photos app. Note that by default the sort order for photos on the Library tab in the Photos app is by capture time. To make it easier to find the photo if they had been captured some time ago you can tap the menu button toward the top of the screen (it shows three horizontal lines) and choose “Sort by Recently Added” from the popup.
