From the course: iOS 16: iPhone and iPad Essential Training

Sync content from your computer to your iOS device

From the course: iOS 16: iPhone and iPad Essential Training

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Sync content from your computer to your iOS device

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- [Instructor] Now let's talk a bit about how to get content from your computer onto your iOS device. If you're using Windows, you'll connect your iPhone or iPad to your computer with the cable that the device came with, and you'll use iTunes to manage the content on your iPhone or iPad. If you're on a Mac running at least macOS 10.15 Catalina, you'll manage your iOS device directly through the Finder. But if you're running an older version of macOS, like macOS 14 Mojave or earlier, you'll continue to use iTunes. Fortunately, there's very little difference between using the Finder and using iTunes on older Macs or Windows. Just start by connecting your iPhone or iPad to your computer. I've already done that, so I'm going to come up here and open up a new Finder window. And I'll see my iPad over here on the left. If you're running iTunes, you'll select your device at the top of the iTunes window. Now at the top of this Finder window, you'll find your device's vitals, like its name, capacity, and current charge level. Below that, we have a series of categories with the General category selected. If you're on iTunes, this will be the Summary category. But here, you can see the software version your iPhone is running. You can see the state of your backups and some other options. The rest of these categories are for managing the content you place on your iOS device, like music, photos, movies, and so on. So let's take a look at how to get music on your device. For this example, I'm going to come down to Options here, and make sure manually manage music, movies, and TV shows is unchecked. This means I'll be able to automatically sync my content instead of dragging in songs to my phone one by one. Now, I should mention at this point 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 movie. 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 important to note here that if you already have songs on your device, syncing from here will erase all of that existing content, which is necessary if you want the same items on your device and your computer, like playlists. For this example, I'm okay with erasing any existing music on my iPhone. So I'll click Sync Music on Garrick's iPhone. Then we have the sync options here. Entire music library means every single song in my music library on my Mac will be copied to my device. Or I could choose to sync only 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, then just choose selected artists, albums, genres, and playlists. And with that selected, we can browse the music here on the computer by artists, albums, genres, and playlists. Here on my Mac, this content is stored in the Music app, but if you're using iTunes on Mac or Windows, that will be content that's stored in iTunes. And all you have to do here is make your way through categories and select the items you want to sync 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 here under Artist, all of my Beatles music will get copied to my iPhone. But if I later add a Beatles album that I didn't previously have in my computer, the next time I sync my iPhone, that new Beatles album will be automatically copied to it. So I can select a bunch of artists here. I can select specific albums or even select a playlist that I created. And once I'm ready, I click Apply, and that music will get synced over to my phone. And this works pretty much the same way for movies, TV shows, podcasts, audiobooks, and so on. Under each of these 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 at this point, then you understand how to sync movies and TV shows and all the other media content. 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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