Apple’s iCloud is pretty cool really. It allows you to store music, videos, apps and more and then lets you share them wirelessly between your devices. Pretty useful, right? However, as Apple is so restricted with what it will allow, it’s useful for apps and not much else as it can’t be used as a Dropbox, to lots of people’s annoyance.
But now, there is a way to upload ANY file to iCloud, including images, audio, PDF’s and file directories. It’s not as simple as Dropbox and doesn’t work between iOS devices, but works between Mac’s and PC’s giving a handy way to share files between these devices.
How to Upload an Image to iCloud
The first step is to go to iCloud.com in the web browser of your choice (I’m using Safari) and log in using your details:
Once you’ve done that, click on iWork (the furthest icon on the right) which should bring up a screen like this:
Then minimize the web browser and select the image that you want to upload. Hold the ‘control’ key and click on the photo, selecting the option to compress the image to a .jpg:
Convert the .zip file you just created to a text file. To do this, select and rename your zip file, deleting the .zip extension and changing it to .txt. You will get a message checking that you definitely want to do this, which you do, so accept the change in the extension.
Now you’ve made your file a text file, go back onto the iCloud and click on the gear icon to upload the file:
Once you have uploaded the file, it should appear like this:
Now, if you login to iCloud.com on any other computer, you should be able to see this file and download it into your downloads folder (This will also appear on iOS devices if you use iCloud but you will get an error message if you try to open it.):
Click onto the file and change the file extension back to .zip from .txt, agreeing to changing the file extension when the message comes up:
Open the image so that a .jpg version appears in your downloads folder:
You should now be able to open and view your image!
How to upload video to iCloud
This process is the same as uploading a photo onto the iCloud and is very simple to carry out.
- Hold ‘Control’, click the file and compress it to a .zip file
- Change the extension of the file from .zip to .txt as before
- Go to iCloud on your web browser, log in and go onto iWork. Upload the .txt version of the video file
- When this has uploaded, go to iCloud on your other computer and download the .txt file. When it has downloaded, locate it in your downloads folder, rename it by removing the .txt extension and replacing it with .zip (so converting it back to a .zip file) and double click the file to open
- You should then have your video!
One thing to be aware of is that iCloud doesn’t give visual warnings of how full your cloud is and so it can be particularly easy to reach your data limit using this method.
When using this method to transfer directories, you don’t have to unzip each individual file and can just unzip the entire directory folder. Therefore, this is a quick process by which files can be transferred between computers.