How to Load Pictures from Your iPhone to Your iMac In 15 Incredibly Frustrating Steps
I’m not sure what it is.
Perhaps my iPhone feels intimidated. It is, after all, the new kid on the block. Dating all the way back to 2008, my iMac must have an almost palpable aura of wisdom by now. It has outlived its warranty, which is as close as consumer electronics come to achieving enlightenment.
Or it could be sullen intransigence on my computer’s part. Maybe it just doesn’t like these new-fangled iOS machines. Maybe it fears obsolescence. Maybe it’s sabotaging the iPhone’s performance to make itself look better — or sabotaging its own in senile self-loathing. Who can fathom the depths of the electric sheep-dreaming mind?
But one way or another these things are terrible at talking to each other. Photos on your iPhone that you’d like to store on your iMac? No Problem! Just follow the simple steps:
1. Plug your iPhone into your iMac.
2. The little storage space message isn’t important. Dismiss that.
3. What? No, you don’t use iTunes for pictures. iTunes is irrelevant. Close iTunes.
4. Okay, now open iPhoto.
5. It’s the one with the palm tree icon.
6. No one knows what the fuck an “event” is. Don’t even worry about that tab.
7. Can you see your iPhone in the menu on the left-hand side?
8. Well, it should be there.
9. Unplug it and try again.
10. There you go.
11. Okay, you’re almost there. Now you just have to select the pictures you want to move onto your computer, drag them into a folder in iPhoto, and let them load.
12. No, you can’t just drag them to the desktop. Obviously.
13. You can drag them TO the desktop FROM iPhoto, once you’ve dragged them FROM your iPhone TO iPhoto.
14. Duh.
15. But only if you took them a while ago. Those pictures you took today aren’t gonna show up on the iPhoto version of your iPhone’s storage for like a week.
16. Sucker.
I may have skipped a couple of steps for people who use complex add-ons like “filters” or “camera programs,” but those people are all pretentious hipsters anyway. Fuck ‘em.
For a company whose brand is built on an image of clever, user-friendly design, these things sure do make it hard on the user. Maybe they need to be a little less friendly to us, and a little more friendly toward other OSX/iOS machines.
Dropbox. It’s like magic.