OS X El Capitan: The Missing Manual

AirDrop

AirDrop has always been pretty great. It lets you shoot photos, videos, maps, Contacts cards, PDF files, Word documents, and all kinds of other stuff—from one Mac to another Mac. Wirelessly. Without having to set up names, passwords, or permissions. Without even having an Internet connection. That Mac-to-Mac AirDrop feature is described on AirDrop.

But in the beginning, you couldn’t use AirDrop between a phone and a Mac. And now you can.

Figure 7-7. AirDrop goes both ways: from iPhone to Mac (shown here), or Mac to iPhone. Actually, it goes many more ways than that, because the iPad and iPod Touch can do it, too. A typical transaction works like this: You choose some photos on the phone and then tap the icon representing the nearby Mac/iPhone/iPad/Touch you’re sending it to (top). Bottom: On the receiving device (in this case, a Mac), a notification pops up to let you know that files are incoming.

From iPhone to Mac

Open whatever it is you want to send: a photo, map, website, contact…anything with a button, on either the Mac or the device.

When you tap , you see the AirDrop panel—and, after a moment, the icons of any nearby Yosemite or later Macs, iPhones, and iPads show up, too. ...