Air-Gallery ($1.99; lite version available) is a straightforward app for wirelessly transferring pictures from your iPhone to your Mac or PC. The Air-Gallery UI is spartan, but so are the number of moving parts (all you need is the iPhone app — no other extra utilities or extra daemons run on your computer).
Here’s how it works:
Air-Gallery can only send pictures to your computer over a local wi-fi connection, but there are multiple clients you can use to actually execute the transfer. The first thing you’ll need to do is actually load up Air-Gallery, check the addresses at the top (one is a Bonjour address, the other is a local IP address), and take a moment to configure your name and password.
You can then connect through Bonjour (via apps like Finder, Cyberduck, or Safari) or navigate to the IP address listed within Air-Gallery from your computer’s browser.
The web interface for Air-Gallery consists of a CoverFlow style view of all the pictures in your camera roll or synced iPhoto album. You’re free to use the arrow keys or mouse pointer to navigate your pictures, and it only takes a single click to start the download process. The trouble with the web view, unfortunately, is the lack of any batch downloading capability.
If you really want to save time with Air-Gallery, you’re probably going to want to use Bonjour for initiating the connection. Thumbnails for pictures on the iPhone don’t show up within Finder, but it’s easy enough to preview files with a quick tap of the spacebar, and full-fledged 1 MB pictures took under a second to transfer from my iPhone to my Mac.
This transfer process is also easily streamlined by adding some sort of Bonjour bookmark to Finder (or whatever client you end up using) so that you can simply fire up Air-Gallery, click on said bookmark, and be ready to transfer. Air-Gallery is also multi-tasking capable, so you can start up a transfer and then leave Air-Gallery to play more Fruit Ninja, if you’re feeling impatient (just make sure not to transfer too much – the limit for multitasking is 10 minutes in the background).
There are few services that work quite as quickly as Air-Gallery, and even the amazing Pastebot can feel a little cumbersome in comparison.
The big trade-off, of course, is the interface (or lack thereof). Air-Gallery has a pretty nifty website, but the actual iPhone app is about as basic as you can get. Aside from the initial screen that shows login information and URLs, everything else in Air-Gallery is a gigantic list with thumbnails. Your camera roll and albums are shown as long, scrolling lists with a thumbnail along the left and details (filename, size, time taken, resolution) along the right.
As amazing as Air-Gallery is in terms of speed and simplicity, I find it’s actually a little too spartan for me. I really like how fast pictures transfer over wi-fi and respect the developers for not forcing some sort of extra utility onto my computer, but I also (surprise, surprise!) really like playing with apps, and there just isn’t very much to fiddle around with on the iPhone side of things. That’s not necessarily a knock against Air-Gallery, but it is something to think about if you’re a person who likes apps with some flair to them.
Air-Gallery is a solid $1.99 purchase for wirelessly transferring pictures from your iPhone to your computer — but don’t expect any bells and whistles for your Toonie (that’s a Canadian for a two-dollar coin, folks).
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Air-Gallery was provided by De Voorkant for review on Just Another iPhone Blog. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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