How to transfer your iPhone photos to a Mac with a cable 1. There are some solid options for moving photos wirelessly, but we found they can struggle to deal with large videos and you may see your images re-compressed, which will reduce image quality. You need to use a third-party work-around for wireless transfers. Using a PC? We recommend sticking with a cable at it feels much like drag and dropping files from a USB stick or external hard drive. AirDrop is also intuitive, and quick to get going: more enjoyable to use even with an older Mac that may not beat cabled speeds. With recent-generation hardware, AirDrop can actually be faster than a cabled connection as Lightning limits transfers to USB 2.0 speeds – that's 60MB per second in theory, but it is closer to 30MB according to our testing.
That does not hold here, if you want to transfer to a Mac rather than a PC. The received wisdom for file transfers is to use a cable if you want quick transfers, or wireless if you’re on-the-go or don’t have a cable to hand.
