This article shows you how to make use of a three-finger gesture to share a photo across your devices in super-quick time. It’s a handy trick to have in your toolkit if AirDrop is playing up or your iCloud Photos are taking ages to sync.
Universal Clipboard is usually associated with copying and pasting text, but by using this gesture, you can make it work really well for sharing images between your devices too.
It can be used to quickly copy images across nearby devices for pasting into Messages, Notes, emails, Pages, and other apps with input fields.
For the following steps to work, you’ll need to have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned on and your devices signed into the same Apple ID and connected to the same network.
- Make sure Handoff is enabled on your devices: On Mac, select System Preferences -> General -> Allow Handoff between this Mac and your iCloud devices. On iPhone/iPad, turn on Settings -> General -> Handoff.
- On iPhone or iPad, perform a three-finger pinch gesture on a photo. On Mac, use the Command+C keyboard shortcut.
- Switch to the device you want to share the photo with, and pinch outward with three fingers to paste it into a text field. If on a Mac, you can perform this gesture on the trackpad or use the Command+V.
PLEASE tell me I am not the only one who didn’t know about this feature 😅😅😅 pic.twitter.com/iBAYEV3JbG — michael tobin (@initialfocus) March 29, 2022
If you want to see the gesture in action, check out the above tweet by Michael Tobin, who was first to popularize it online.
