How to move videos from Mac to iCloud Photo Library (Beta)

With the beta release of , all your photos and videos are stored in iCloud. Only low-res versions are stored on your iOS devices. This helps you save precious space on your iPhone.

Provided you have an Internet connection, iCloud Photo Library (Beta) lets you access the entire picture and video collection you have collected through the years.

Pictures and videos shot with your iPhone/iPad are automatically uploaded to iCloud Photo Library, but how about the media currently stored on your Mac? It would be nice to be able to access that stuff while away from your computer.

Until Photos for Mac is released at the beginning of 2015, we will have to resort to some workaround to move videos from OS X to iCloud Photo Library (Beta). In this post I’ll give you two solutions.

AirDrop

The easiest way to transfer existing home videos from your Mac to your iOS device is through . My experience shows that this method works reliably for files with less than 1GB in size. This is what you need to do:

  1. Open the Finder folder where your home videos are stored
  2. Select two-three files at a time (or in any case any number whose combined size is less than 1GB)
  3. Make sure that AirDrop is enabled on your iPhone
  4. Click on Share –> AirDrop at the top of the window

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Dropbox

The old good Dropbox is useful when you need to move to iCloud big video files. The process is straightforward:

  1. While on your Mac, copy the video file to Dropbox
  2. Access it from your iOS device
  3. Save it to your iPhone

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Conclusions

After moving my home videos to iCloud, I tested the playback speed from my iPhone. I was surprised with the lack of latency and how well the system is integrated with iOS.

Remember that these techniques work only if you have iCloud Photo Library (Beta) enabled.

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