How do I get my photos onto somebody else's iphone?

April 14, 2012 8:20 AM

I'd like photos that I take on my iPhone to automatically turn up on my mom's iPhone. I'd prefer to do this without setting up my iCloud account on her phone, since we don't need to share contacts, calendars, etc. Ideally the solution would be completely transparent for her, and require little or no ongoing effort from me once it's set up. Any tips on the best way to do this?
posted by yankeefog to computers & internet (8 answers total)

Photo stream (via iCloud) is definitely the easiest way to do this. You don't need to share everything, just enable Photo Stream in the iCloud settings and nothing else.
posted by neustile at 8:24 AM on April 14, 2012

Dropbox?
posted by kenchie at 8:35 AM on April 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

Assuming you don't use G+ on your iPhone, you could set up a Gmail account specifically for this, both sign into G+ on your respective iPhones using that account and make the settings automatically upload your photos to G+ (they don't automatically get shared to the public, they sit in private albums). You would have to open the app to get the photos to move automatically across but you wouldn't have to do any other work than that.
posted by KateViolet at 8:52 AM on April 14, 2012

Is there a reason you can't just text message or email them all at once? You can choose multiple photos and send them all with one go. If you email them all to her, she can download them all at once and they'll show up on her screen.
posted by katypickle at 8:52 AM on April 14, 2012

Dropbox.
posted by gramcracker at 8:57 AM on April 14, 2012

Set up a flickr account one for each of you. On her phone/account, make sure she has you as a contact. Any photos you want to share can be uploaded directly from your iphone or computer to flickr and will appear in her flickr feed. This will require a small bit of effort on your part but will work with absolutely zero effort on her part.

I do this to share my own photos with friends and family.
posted by Beacon Inbound at 11:31 AM on April 14, 2012

Thirding dropbox!
posted by punkrockrat at 7:37 PM on April 14, 2012

Thanks, everybody! The Google+ solution looks like it's going to be exactly what I was looking for.

(Dropbox is a great idea, but I'm already using 95% of the space on my free Dropbox account, and am hoping to avoid paying for more storage. And I didn't try Flickr because I got to Google+ first, but it sounds as though that would work for me too. So if Google Plus doesn't work out, I'll consider springing for a Dropbox subscription, and I'll try Flickr, too. )

Thanks again!
posted by yankeefog at 3:51 PM on April 17, 2012