Airdrop: How Apple made my life easier

As a driving member of the V! Studios social media team, posting engaging content presents a host of challenges. Without considering contextual merits of a post, actually posting the content shouldn’t stand as a blocker.


Posting photos and videos from any given platform is fairly simple and straightforward. Take a picture or capture a video, open the app of choice, and then boom – you’re done. But, what if your content needs just that extra bit of polish with and edit here or a touch of color correction there to bring out a deep blue sky?


Facebook and Twitter have you covered but what about Instagram? How do you post that first rate snippet from your animation team that is sure to get numerous ‘likes’ to Instagram?


I know what you’re thinking, “Come on V-Studios. You guys deal with sophisticated web application development tools and are well versed in AWS architecture. Surely you have heard of Dropbox or Google Drive, right?” Well, right you are.


The problem with leveraging cloud storage to transfer multimedia assets? The convoluted solution. Transferring a file from a desktop to mobile device involves uploading the file to a cloud storage account followed by downloading the file from the associated application on your mobile device.  While not a proverbial case of rocket science, the process can certainly present difficulty for users.

Enter Airdrop from Apple. Airdrop, per wikipedia, “is an ad-hoc service in Apple Inc.‘s OS X and iOS operating systems, introduced in Mac OS X Lion (OS X 10.7) and iOS 7, which enables the transfer of files among supported Macintosh computers and iOS devices without using mail or a mass storage device.”

Relying on Airdrop provides a clear pathway to transfer of photo and video files with a simple drag and drop within finder to a mobile iOS device from Apple desktop/laptop. From the other side, transferring files from iPhones and iPads, the process holds the same simple approach. 

Detailed instructions for the Airdrop transfer process can be found on the Apple support site.
iPhone/iPad to Mac
Mac to Iphone/iPad
Following the steps as laid out by Apple in the links above will greatly facilitate the transfer of large digital media assets for posting to content to social media sites, especially Instagram.
Use Airdrop and have content posted in seconds or use multiple apps to transfer content and face the struggle that Windows and Android users likely know all to well.

In the meantime this video file weighs in at around 85MB, not exactly email friendly. For Airdrop? Not much of a challenge.

A video posted by V! Studios (@the_v_studios) on