Before you AirDrop photos from iPhone to Mac Here are the basics for wirelessly transferring photos from iPhone to Mac using AirDrop. If you aren’t automatically syncing your iPhone files to your Mac using iCloud, AirDrop is the best way to transfer photos, videos, and music. It’s also great for sharing all your favorite iPhone videos. This is useful for photographers who take photos with their iPhones but like to do their editing on the big screen. Let’s start with using AirDrop from iPhone to Mac. Here’s a complete guide to using AirDrop, along with some ideas for troubleshooting any issues you might be having. You can easily AirDrop files from Mac to iPhone or vice versa as long as you have your settings configured correctly on your devices.
AirDrop saves so much time and is especially valuable when you are transferring large files like videos and music files.
They do not get re-encoded when you use Export Unmodified Original.One of the greatest and most useful features of Apple products is the ability to AirDrop files wirelessly across your devices - and even the devices of other Apple users. However the videos appear to be re-encoded regardless of the settings you choose for Export. It’s also worth mentioning that you’ll get to choose compression options when you export videos as well. So I'm not sure why you're seeing different behavior. As far as I can tell, this is not a case of Photos simply applying your last-used settings. Personally, when I drag an iPhone photo from Photos to my desktop, it is exported with the same size and quality as an Unmodified Original or a photo shared by email as Actual Size. Using Export with High quality on an unmodified photo should produce the same photo as Unmodified Original. That is why the size of the exported photo won’t match the original. Note that when you Export an edited photo, Photos re-encodes that photo (necessary to apply the changes).
Therefore, I would only use Maximum for images imported manually, known to use a lesser compression (higher quality) originally. On the other hand, Maximum produced a file almost three times as large, with no perceivable difference in quality when blown up on a 27” non-Retina iMac. Unmodified Original, High and email as Actual Size from both iPhone and macOS all came out to the same size (although emailing from macOS occasionally produced a slightly larger file).
Make sure you pick Full Size as the Size.įor JPEG Quality, I recommend High for photos taken with an iPhone or iPad, as I believe this is the quality setting used by iOS to save photos.Īs a test, I emailed an iPhone photo to myself as Actual Size, from my iPhone then from macOS Photos (using the Share action), and also exported it using Unmodified Original, High and Maximum. If you expand the Photos section by clicking the ∨ button you will be given the choice of several parameters for your export. What I would suggest is using the standard Export command instead ( ⇧ shift ⌘ cmd E). However, if you've made edits to the photo, they will be lost with that command. is absolutely correct that you can Export Unmodified Original, which will give you a full-quality copy of your original.
The title of your question asks how to export photos in full quality, whereas your last sentence asks how to recover your original photo.