Transfer images with PhotoSync

- Hi, I'm Seán Duggan and this week I want to talk a little bit about the very common task of moving images from your phone onto your computer, or from your computer back onto your phone. You know, sometimes, I just want to transfer a handful of images and I don't want to go through the entire involved process of downloading directly from my phone into my light-room catalog, or transferring the images in some other way. I just want something quick and easy, And for those times, I use an app called PhotoSync. Now the cool thing about PhotoSync is that it's available for both iOS and Android platforms, and it's nearly identical on each system, and it let's me quickly and easily use a WiFi connection to move images from my phone, or my iPad, over onto my computer or vice versa.

Now, there's two components to using PhotoSync. There's the app that you purchase and install on your device. It's only, I think, about two or three dollars, and then there's a companion app that you install on your computer. The companion app is free, and it's available for both Mac and Windows. So, let's take a look at this, and I'll show you how it works. All right, here's my PhotoSync app. I'm just going to open that up, there. And when you first go into PhotoSync, it shows you the images in your Camera Roll or your main gallery view, and you can see up here, I can display just the Photos, or just the Videos, and I've got a grid-view or a list-view.

So, a couple different ways I can look at my images. Let's go back to grid-view there. Now to select the images, you can just tap on them, and you'll see a little red check mark appear on there, and then you would tap on the red dot up in the upper right corner to start the transfer. We'll get into that in a second. I want to show you a couple other things about this first. I want to go into my Album view, here. So on iOS, it shows me my Camera Roll and the Moments albums as well as the smart albums.

On iOS, the smart albums are just the albums that are automatically populated based on whether they're Favorites, or Videos, Slo-mos, Selfies, et cetera. And then, down below here are my user defined albums. And the cool thing about this is that it displays the albums in alphabetical order. Now, that may not seem like a big deal to you, but I have run into so many apps where when I'm trying to navigate to go and find a certain image, I find that the app does not display the albums in alphabetical order, and I find that to be incredibly frustrating. So, definitely a cool thing that it displays the albums in alphabetical order.

You know, it's a small thing, but sometimes those small things really make the experience of using an app so much better. All right, I'm go here into one of my albums, here, called For Composites and this is an album that I put images in that I think might be useful for composites. Now, one thing to notice here is that most of these images have a blue highlight border around the thumbnail, and that's because those are images that I have not yet transferred onto my computer. These textures of the sand, here in the middle, they don't have a blue border because I've already transferred those onto my computer.

So, it's really cool that PhotoSync keeps track of which images I have transferred to the computer using the app. I find that to be very, very useful. So earlier I mentioned that you could just sort of tap on thumbnails to select them, but another thing you can do is if you come up here and just tap the red dot, that gives you the ability to modify the selection and choose images in different ways. So, if I tap on Modify Selection, there, you'll see that I have the option to select a range of images. I can also mark all of them as synced, and if I pre-selected some images, there'd be some other choices here.

Well right now, I'm going to select a range, and you'll see a little thing that just popped up there. I can do a single tap to select, or a double tap to select a range. So, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to double tap on that first image, and then if I tap on the last image, it selects all of the images between those taps. So, that's pretty cool. Let me just show you one other thing, here, on the Android phone. To get to the Select Range feature on the Android phone, what you would do is just tap the three dots up here in the upper right, and that's where you get the Modify Selection menu, and then you get that same menu that I showed you on the iPhone.

Let me go back here to the iPhone. And now that I'm ready to transfer these images, I'm going to come up and tap the red dot up in the upper right corner, and you can see here that I can choose to transfer only the New images, here, the Selected images, or All of the images. Now, it's looking at the images in this particular album, because I have a lot more than 110 pictures on my phone, at the moment. So, that's what this count refers to, I'm in a particular album.

So, I'll tap on Selected because I only want to send those selected images, and you can see, here, that I can choose a computer, I can choose another phone or tablet. So, for instance, I could send images from my iPhone over to the Android phone or to an iPad. And there are a number of cloud-based storage and backup and image sharing possibilities, here, Dropbox, Flickr, Facebook, Google Drive, et cetera. So, I really appreciate that there are all these options for how to move images off of my phone either onto my computer or somewhere else.

I'm going to choose my computer, here, and since I have the PhotoSync companion app installed on my MacBook Pro, here, it sees my MacBook Pro. So, I can just tap that and now it's going to start that transfer and move those images over onto the MacBook Pro. So now they're down on the MacBook Pro, and I'm going to show you something pretty cool about this, it opens up a Finder window showing me the folder where it's transferred those images into.

Let me actually close that because I have this opened up, here. What it does on the Mac is that it stores the images, or transfers the images, into your Pictures folder. It creates a folder for the device. So here's a folder that says Sean Duggan's iPhone6. Here's another one that says Samsung SM-G930U. So, this is the Samsung phone. So, it creates a folder for each device, and then within this folder, here, it creates other folders based on where the images came from on my phone.

So, you can see there's one for Camera Roll, Composites, Creative Scene, whatever. These are all albums on my iPhone, and here is this For Composites folder because I transferred the images out of the For Composites album. So, I think that that's a really slick and neat way of organizing the images. I love how it preserves the organizational structure of where the images came from on the phone. Let's take a look at moving images from the computer onto the mobile device. So, if you have the PhotoSync open on your computer, here, as I do, you can come up to the Files menu and just choose Send Photos and Videos, Command-O or Control-O is a shortcut.

Or, there's a better way to do this, and this is the way that I always like to do this. I have this image, here, on my desktop, and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to drag this down onto the PhotoSync icon in my doc and just drop it there onto that icon, and it opens up here and it sees the two devices that I have PhotoSync installed on. So, it's seeing both the Samsung Galaxy S7 as well as my iPhone 6. I'm going to put this one on my iPhone 6. Now, another cool thing is that I can choose the album where it's going to go to on my phone.

So, Camera Roll is the default or I can just choose Change Album, and here it's showing me a list of all the different albums that are on my phone. So, very, very cool functionality, there. Now, I can choose one of these albums, of course, but you know what if I want it in a new album? What if the album where I want to place it is not here? Well, I can actually make a new album, right here, from my desktop. So, I'm going to open that up and I'm just going to choose a New Album, and I'll just call this Artifacts.

Click OK, and here's that new album that's been created. I'll select that. You can see it's selected down here, and now I'll just click on Send, and it'll send that. So, if I come over here to the Albums list and go to that newly created Artifacts album, I can see that there is that image that I just transferred over from my computer. So, the cool thing about PhotoSync is that it's very convenient, it'll work on both Android and iOS, and I really appreciate it for just how well designed it is and how well implemented the app is.

It lets me quickly and easily move images between my various mobile devices and my computer or vice versa.