This Little-Known IPhone Gesture Could Be a Great Alternative to AirDrop
If you’ve owned Apple devices for a while, you probably think you know them pretty well. You have your different routines, habits and techniques and you do what you need to do. But over the years, Apple has added a lot of features to its flagship products , including a lot of hidden gestures you might not have known about . As MacRumors reminded us this week , one of these gestures is actually good for sharing photos and videos across various Apple devices, and is probably faster than AirDrop in some cases.
The gesture itself is quite simple: just open a photo or video, then take three fingers (thumb, index and middle) and press them together on the image. If everything is successful, you will see a Copy pop-up window at the top of the screen. (With this gesture, you can also close the image, but if you’ve copied it, you’re done.) You can also just copy text or an image the old-fashioned way, by highlighting the text and copying it, or long-pressing on the image and tapping Copy.
From here, you can paste a photo or video anywhere by tapping the text field and choosing Paste, or dragging it out with three fingers instead of pinching it. However, the real convenience of this trick is taking advantage of the Universal Clipboard feature of Apple’s ecosystem, which allows you to copy and paste items between devices. So you can copy a photo to your iPhone and instantly paste it to your Mac, or copy a video from your iPad and paste it to your iPhone. (Unfortunately, this gesture doesn’t work on Macs, even on machines with a trackpad.)
For this to work, your devices must be signed into the same Apple account and connected to the same Wi-Fi network with Bluetooth turned on. Additionally, you need to enable Handoff on all devices. You may already have this option turned on, but just in case, go to Settings (System Preferences on a Mac) > General > Airplay & Continuity > Handoff .
With Handoff enabled on all devices, rinse and repeat: On your iPhone or iPad, try using three fingers to pinch any downloaded photo or video. Then paste it onto another open device.
Next time you have a photo or video on one device that you want on another, try this over other methods like AirDrop or texting yourself. Not only will you share the file faster, you’ll already have the media inserted where it needs to be. A win-win.