iOS Tip — Mobile Video: Transferring Content to the Device (Part 1 of 3)

External Video to Device Camera Roll

2 min readJun 12, 2017

Transfer Video from USB to Device Camera Roll

Introduction

With the popularity of social media, the cloud and video content sharing, it has become almost imperative to have at least some basic video management skills.

My video skills are beginner, at best, but I thought it would be helpful to share my typical process for managing the content and creating shareable video (longer form in this example). My process is mobile — I use the iPhone and iPad for most of what I do.

I view the process in three steps:

1 — Access the video (create, acquire, etc.)

2 — Compress the video to a workable size (if needed)

3 — Create content / clips to share — TO COME

1 —Access / Transfer Video to the Camera Roll

What’s Needed:

A computer (if video is located on a USB drive…)
A cloud storage account (OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.)
iPhone or iPad

Steps to Transfer Video

Here are the steps to transfer video from a USB drive to your iPhone or iPad.

Plug the USB drive into your computer.
Copy video file from the USB drive onto your computer.
Sign into your cloud storage account online (make sure you have enough space available to transfer the video into the cloud!) — in my case, I use Microsoft OneDrive for large files.
Upload the video from your computer to the cloud (wi-fi connectivity is fine to do this).
Once the upload is complete, open the cloud storage app (again, OneDrive in my case) on your iPhone or iPad. Download the file into your device’s Camera Roll.
You’re Done!