Yet another use for Dropbox: USB cable

As a seasoned world traveler and Apple geek, I'm always fascinated to see how others in the Mac and iPhone community make lemonade from lemons when they encounter difficulties on the road. The Mac Observer's Jeff Gamet was recently in Italy (and may still be there) and from the sound of a recent post, he must have arrived well before part of his luggage did. The result? He had a lot of photos on his iPhone that needed to be moved to his Mac, and didn't have a USB cable to link the two.

His solution? Use Dropbox and the hotel's Wi-Fi connection instead of emailing photos and then saving the attached photos to a folder on your Mac. The simple answer involves making sure that you have a Dropbox account (doesn't everybody?), the Dropbox iPhone app [Free, iTunes Link], and access to a Wi-Fi network.

Within the Dropbox app, tap on the Camera button, then tap Existing Photo or Video. From the iPhone's photo albums, you can send your photos to any one of the folders in your Dropbox. As Jeff points out in his post, this has the added benefit of making sure that your vacation photos are backed up online.

Once you've moved the photos to your Dropbox, it's a simple matter of moving or copying them over to your Mac's photo library by literally clicking and dragging them (or option-clicking and dragging if you want to make a copy and keep the originals in the Dropbox) to the iPhone app icon in the dock.

There's only one issue; you have to move one photo or video at a time with the current version of the Dropbox app. Let's hope that Dropbox can address that in an upcoming version of the app.

[Tip of the travelin' hat to Jeff Gamet, The Mac Observer]
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