When I used to use my MacBook as my primary computing device, getting the photos I took on my iPad across to it was easily done using Apple’s Airdrop system. Fast, easy and effective. As far as I’m aware though, you can’t do that with a Windows based PC, certainly not without getting into smaller scale, third party software.

I do use Dropbox though and I had experiment with using the iOS Photos App to send to Dropbox. It worked well for single photos but my experience was that batch jobs were unpredictable. You’d usually get at least one photo through but rarely the full set and it felt like as much babysitting as sending the files one at a time.

A few weeks ago I had a brainwave which turned out to work. What about, instead of trying to go from Photos to Dropbox, using Dropbox to upload the images from Photos? It turns out that works much better. It is slower than Airdrop but it also means the images get straight onto my cloud backup. It works for one, few or many; my largest test so far was about 60 shots from Yorkshire Sculpture park last week. Not all data flows are equal but now I’ve found a free and reliable way to replace the Airdrop functionality.