Transfering Photoshop files to Windows PC through iPhone?

November 25, 2013 3:52 PM

Is there a way to transfer Photoshop files from a Dropbox folder to a Windows 8 PC, via iPhone, without wifi?

Here's what I have to work with:

-Windows 8 tablet PC. Wifi and bluetooth enabled, but there will be no wifi where I'm working.
-iPhone 5S with a weak but usable cell signal. I do not have tethering and would prefer to avoid adding it.

I receive Photoshop .psd files through a shared Dropbox folder. I can view them through the Dropbox app on my phone, but is there any way to transfer them through the app to the PC (and vice versa) without some kind of wifi?

posted by Nedroid to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

When you look at one of them on your phone, do you see a little box with an arrow in the lower left corner of the phone, down in the, whatever it's called, option bar? Which if you select that icon, it gives you options, including email. May depend a lot on how large/complex the file is.
posted by rtha at 3:58 PM on November 25, 2013

Rtha, they won't be able to access email on the tablet since they'll have no internet access on it.

I can take some screenshots and make a lil photo guide here at some point late tonight if you get confused at any step of this, and i had to google to verify what i'm thinking of is possible but here. It seems that if you select the psd file as "favorite" it saves it locally on the phone, even if there isn't an obvious download button. I don't have the dropbox app on my phone right now.

So any iphone app that can locally save files lets you get at those files from itunes when it's plugged in. In Ye Olden Days before apps like djay were allowed to access the local music library, you'd add them this way.

You connect the phone to the tablet with USB, open itunes, select the phone, then go through the various tabs of things you can sync.

On the one that shows all the apps, down at the bottom will be options to add or remove locally stored files by the app.

I'm 99.9999% sure that any file you saved to the phones internal storage will be visible here, and you can just click and drag it on out. I know you can click and drag it IN, and i remember some photo editor(i think?) that dealt with non-jpg files letting you drag them both directions here.

I'm gonna brainstorm on whether or not there's another way to do this, because i've absolutely had some zoolander-esque "how do we get the files out of the computer phone!" moments like this, in which i had a file on my phone and no internet access. I clearly remember this method working, but i'm not 100% on whether dropbox shows up as having an accessible storage folder in itunes like some other apps do.
posted by emptythought at 4:05 PM on November 25, 2013

Response by poster: Unfortunately Dropbox is not one of the available apps in the File Sharing area. Interestingly, I was able to use this technique to upload a .psd from the PC to one of the apps that is available (PlainText), though there's still no way to move it to/from Dropbox from there.
posted by Nedroid at 4:30 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: iExplorer can get to apps' files that aren't visible in iTunes file sharing. Maybe you can see Dropbox's cache with it. But if you need to get files into Dropbox, that won't work.
posted by zsazsa at 4:50 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Nice! iExplorer works, though a little indirectly. I can't get the files through Dropbox, but from the Dropbox app I can send them to the Google Drive app, which I can access with iExplorer. Getting files onto the phone is less important, so this will work nicely. Thank you!
posted by Nedroid at 5:13 PM on November 25, 2013