From the course: iOS 17: iPhone and iPad Essential Training

Sync content from your computer to your iOS device

From the course: iOS 17: iPhone and iPad Essential Training

Sync content from your computer to your iOS device

- [Instructor] Now let's talk a bit about how to get content from your computer onto your iOS device. Now, if you're using Windows you'll connect your iPhone or iPad to your computer and you'll use iTunes to manage the content on your device. If you're on a Mac running at least macOS 10.15 Catalina you'll manage your iOS device directly through the Finder. Fortunately, there's little difference between using the Finder and using iTunes on older Macs and Windows. Just start by connecting your iPhone or iPad to your computer. Now we'll open up a new finder window and here under locations I'll find my iPhone and we'll just make that a little larger. Now, if you're running iTunes, you'll select your device at the top of the iTunes window, but here at the top of the finder window, you can find your device's information like its name, its capacity, and current charge level. Below that, we have several categories with the general category selected, or if you're on iTunes this will be the summary category. And here you can see the software version your iPhone is running, the state of your backups, and some other options. The rest of the categories here at the top are for managing the content you place on your iOS device, like music, photos, movies, and so on. So for example, let's take a look at how to get music on your device. I'm going to come down here under Options and uncheck manually manage music, movies and TV shows. This means I'll be able to automatically sync my content instead of dragging in songs one by one onto my iPhone. Now, I should mention that if you subscribe to either Apple's iTunes Match Service or their Apple Music Service, you won't be able to sync music the way I show you in this video. Instead, music will be synced and managed from your device since your music will live in iCloud. But in this case, I'm not using those services. So I'm going to select the music category. Now, it's very important to note here that if you already have songs on your device, syncing here will erase all of that existing content, which is necessary if you want the items on your device and your computer like playlists to be identical. But for this example, I'm okay with erasing any existing music on my iPhone. So I'm going to check sync music on my iPhone. So here next to Sync, we have entire music library which means every single song in my music library will be copied to my device, or I can choose to only sync selected artists, albums, genres, and playlists. Now, it's entirely possible that the size of your iTunes library may exceed the storage capacity of your iOS device. So syncing your entire library might not be an option. If that's the case, just choose this second option. We can then browse the music on the computer by artists, albums, genres, and playlists. Here on my Mac this is the content stored in the music app. If you're using iTunes on Windows, this will be the music that's stored in iTunes, and all you have to do here is make your way through these categories and select the items that you want to have synced to your device. The beauty of this is that once you've made your selections you don't have to do anything else. So for example, if I have the Beatles selected under artist all of my Beatles music will be copied to my iPhone, but if later I add a Beatles album that I didn't previously have in music, the next time I sync my iPhone that new Beatles album will be automatically copied to it. So again, I can just go through here and start selecting artists or I could select specific albums, genres, or playlists. When I'm done, I can just click apply and that music will be copied over to my iPhone. And that's basically how to sync music to your iPhone or iPad. It works pretty much the same for movies, TV shows, photos and so on. Under each one of the media categories is an option to sync them, and in each case you can choose what sort of content to sync. So if you understand how to sync music then you understand how to sync the movies and TV shows and other media content on your computer. Basically the choices boil down to either copying over all of your content in each category or copying just selected content you haven't watched or listened to yet.

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