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Snapping a quick picture on your iPhone is easy, but getting the image on your desktop can sometimes be a chore. Bump, an early iPhone app that made it easy to swap contact info by "bumping" two iPhones together, now lets you bump your iPhone on your computer to send a selection of images straight to your computer's hard drive, or even to Bump's photo-sharing cloud service.
I'll give you a scenario to illustrate how Bump can make the process of using pictures from your iPhone or Android phone a little easier (it's one I've run into personally on numerous occasions). Say you want to list an item on Craigslist: you snap a picture or two of the item using your iPhone, and you need to get the pictures to your computer so you can upload them to Craigslist.
You could connect your iPhone via USB, and use Image Capture or iPhoto syncing to get the images to your Mac. If you use Photo Stream on your iPhone, the photos will eventually sync to iPhoto and you can copy them from there. Because my sync cable is generally at the other end of the house on the nightstand, I usually e-mail the photos to myself.
None of these methods are difficult, nor do they take that much time. But all of these methods involve some friction—that is, they slow down the workflow from the time you snap the picture until it ends up on your Craigslist listing.
This is where the latest version of Bump comes in. The app had previously added a feature that would let you share photos between two smartphones or tablets—it works cross-platform between iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. The version 3.3 update (for iOS) released this week takes that sharing one step further, allowing you to virtually bump your smartphone to your desktop or laptop to wirelessly scoot the images right onto your computer's drive.
Just select the images you want to transfer (left). Once you bump your phone to your computer, tap "connect" to upload images.
Once you have Bump installed and set up—I'm not a regular user, but it took me about 2 minutes—simply swipe to the right once to access your images. You can select as many as you want to bump to another user, or bump them to your computer. I selected three pictures: one of the house, one of some sweet Kiss bobbleheads going up on Craigslist, and a gratuitous picture of the dogs.
Bumping uses location information—to determine that two devices are in close proximity—as well as the accelerometer to detect a bump. It also uses a connection between two devices running the Bump app to send the information to the right recipient. There's no Bump app for your computer, however—instead, it uses a lightweight Web app at https://bu.mp. You'll be asked to give the Bump Web service permission to use your location (Safari offers the option to only allow the use of location data for one day, if you prefer). And since there's no Web API to access your computer's accelerometer (if it even has one), you bump your phone on your computer's space bar.
The Bump Web app will need to access your location data.
At first, I found this seemingly simple process to be a bit tricky. I tried tapping my iPhone lightly on the space bar to no avail—the app didn't register a positive bump. Then I apparently tapped too hard, and the app gave me a helpful tip to use a "light fist-bump."
"A good bump is a light fist-bump."
Once I got the action down right, the images transferred almost instantaneously to the Bump website. Technically, the images aren't yet on your machine, though. You can drag and drop them to your desktop—or, as I'm wont to do, directly onto the Photoshop icon. In addition, you can click a "download" button to pull the image into your downloads folder. There are also buttons at the top right which let you download all the images as a single ZIP file, get a link to share them via Twitter, IM, or another method, or send the images to Facebook.
I wanna rock and roll all night, and download pictures every day.
The bumping process is a little hokey, but it did make it ever so slightly easier to get to the images and use them on my Mac. I didn't have to track down my sync cable, I didn't have to set up Photo Stream (which, for various reasons, I don't like using), and I didn't have to wait for the images to go from my phone through various e-mail servers, and finally back down to my Mac. Also, I wasn't limited to sending five images at a time—in one test, I sent 20 images to my Mac in about 10 seconds.
Gratuitous humorous image of dogs. You're welcome.
Reducing that friction may not be a priority for everyone, but when you just need to get an image or two from your smartphone to your computer, and in a hurry, Bump is a solution worth considering. As a side benefit, you'll still get the device-to-device sharing that Bump has always offered.
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