I don’t know what the demographic for this is, but in my iPhone usage, I’ve had to transfer hundreds of images—screenshots mostly—from my iPhone to the Mac. I sometimes use iPhoto for the transfer, Image Capture, or even email myself the pics. I’m pretty sure all that will go away now, with WifiPhoto.

An app bred out the simple need of quickly transferring pictures from the iPhone to the Mac, WifiPhoto excels at its task. Launch the app, tap-select a bunch of images from your Camera Roll, open a web page on your Mac with the supplied url, and you’re off to downloading images on click. WifiPhoto directly goes to the camera roll which is a brilliant move, or you can set it to go to the Library first. In my usage, the app has been responsive, and easy to use. There is an irritating delay between selecting images, but I’m sure the developer will be able to fix that if we pester him enough. It’s not a deal breaker in any way.

I’ve also created a fluid app for all iPhone wifi connections. Apps like AirSharing connect over the http://ip.ad.re.ss:8080, but you can also use your (bonjour) device name, such as http://iphonename.local:8080 for accessing the device regardless of the current IP address. I had created a Fluid menubar app for AirSharing, but even WifiPhoto loads up in that same window without any issues. My workflow for moving images has been effectively cut in half.

WifiPhoto costs $0.99 at the App Store, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who doesn’t want to dock the iPhone every time they want to transfer images.

Before I published this writeup, Preshit mentioned that DropBox (and others I’m sure) can be used to achieve the same end goal, for free. You could even use the Photoshop Mobile app to send images across. The beauty of WifiPhoto is that it provides a 1:1 connection to your desktop, so you don’t have to delete anything from anywhere. It’s also totally independent of an internet connection, which is great for internet starved folks like myself. To me this feels right; you may disagree.

Updated: Trying out PhotoToMac

As the developer of PhotoToMac let me take it for a spin, I’m here with my verdict. For one, the procedure is a little too complex. You have to follow the ‘How to‘ to enable shared folders from within system preferences, all of which seems like extra work. Second, it only works on Macs. The connection refused to work when the MacBook was plugged in via ethernet, but when Wifi was turned it it went through just fine. WifiPhoto on the other hand had no problems with either connection.

Once the procedure is done however, transferring images is relatively quicker than with WifiPhoto. Just tap-tap-tap and they show up on your Mac. So if you’re mostly looking to transfer images to a limited number of Macs, PhotoToMac definitely has the [slightly] better workflow. But considering the setup involved, and lack of PC support, I’d say I’m going to stick to my recommending WifiPhoto. PhotoToMac is also available for $0.99, and you can check out this YouTube video to see what the workflow feels like.