Move a trip from your iPhone to your Mac, or back, over your own Wi-Fi with a six-digit code.
Start a trip on your iPhone on the train home and finish the film on your Mac. The trip goes straight from one device to the other over your Wi-Fi, with its rides, its photos and clips, and every change you made to it. It doesn’t pass through our servers or anybody else’s.
Both devices need How It Went open, and both have to be on the same Wi-Fi network. Some networks keep devices apart on purpose (a guest network in a hotel, often), and on those the two will never see each other.
The steps below go from an iPhone to a Mac. Any pair works the same way, an iPad, an Android phone or a second Mac included: the device that receives opens the screen, the device that sends picks the trip.
The code is only needed once. Two devices that have paired recognize each other afterwards, and the next trip goes over without it. After five wrong tries the code stops working; leave Receive a trip on the Mac and open it again for a new one.
The Mac shows which trip is coming, how many files it carries and how big it is, and whether you already have it. A trip that is new here gets Add this trip.
If the Mac already has a copy, it compares the two and says so. When the incoming copy has everything the Mac’s copy has and more, the button is Update this trip. When the two are the same copy, it says that adding it changes nothing, and the button is Add it anyway. When the copy on the Mac has edits the incoming one doesn’t, or both were edited since they last matched, you choose between Keep both and Replace what’s here, and Keep both adds the incoming copy as a separate trip. Not now leaves everything as it was.
Then it copies. Files the Mac already has stay where they are, so sending a trip again after a small change is quick. Stay on this screen until it finishes. If the copy stops partway, what arrived is kept, and sending the trip again picks up from there.
When it is done, the Mac says the trip is on this device now, and Open it takes you straight to it.
The same screen receives a finished film. On the iPhone, choose Receive a trip from another device. On the Mac, the screen that comes up once a film is written has Send this film to another device next to the buttons that save and share it. The iPhone says which trip the film is for and how big it is, and Keep this film takes it. It stays in the app, ready to save to Photos or share. If the iPhone already has a film for that trip, the button is Replace the film on this device instead, and it says what it would replace.
Checked on October 28, 2026, against: