Fastest Way To Transfer Content From Your DJI Mini 3 Pro Drone

Good day, folks! Shawn, here from Air Photography. So, in today’s video, we’re going to be talking about different ways in which you can transfer the content from your DJI Mini 3 Pro or Mini 3 over to your smartphone, tablet, or even your PC.

Several ways to transfer content from DJI Mini 3 Pro

There are several ways in which you can do it, and you may find personally that some are more convenient than others.

Now, before we get too far into the video here, there is something I do want to go over with you, especially if you are brand new to flying a DJI drone. No matter whether you’re flying with the RC-N1 controller, and you have a smartphone attached to it. Or if you’re flying with the DJI RC, when you have the drone up in the air, and you hit the record button, two versions of the video will be recorded.

A high-res version will be recorded to the memory card within the drone, but a low-resolution version is also going to be recorded and saved within the DJI Fly App. And for the most part, when you will be doing your editing down the road, you want to use the high-res version that’s stored on the drone.

However, the low-res versions are handy because it allows you to preview what you filmed while you’re out in the field without having to fire up the drone or transfer any content. And you can access that by clicking on the album button. I’m going to switch it over to “Aircraft Album,” and as you can see, all the different things we have filmed are stored right on the controller within the DJI Fly app.

Again, all these videos are a low-res preview version, but we can go into each one, we can play and preview. So, it gives us a nice preview of what we’ve captured, which is nice out in the field, especially if you’re trying to get a very specific shot. You can give it a brief look to make sure everything is looking the way you wanted it to.

But as mentioned, the better quality video will be stored on the memory card that’s inside the drone. Now, when we want to transfer it either over to our smartphone, tablet, or a PC or Mac, there are a couple of different ways in which we can do it.

Transfer content from the DJI Mini 3 Pro with a SD card reader to an iPad

Now the first way, and this is my preferred method, I find it’s the easiest and the quickest, is just to pull the memory card right out of the DJI Mini 3 Pro drone and then use some kind of memory card reader.

Now, there are many card readers that you can use. This here is a specific Apple one with USB-C for an iPad. But you can also get a version with a lightning port if you’re going to be connecting it to an iPhone. And there are all different third-party ones available on Amazon, and for the most part, they all work well.

Now, just to quickly demonstrate on my iPad here, just because it does have a larger screen, and it’ll be easier for you to see. Once we’ve plugged our card into the device, there are two different ways in which we can transfer. Now, this is again going with an iOS device. If you’re using Android, it will be slightly different.

The first is using the Apple Photos app. We can launch our Photos app, and then over here along devices, we should see the memory card that we have plugged in. Currently, it just says “Untitled” because it doesn’t have a name, and we can click on that.

And as you can see here, all the files on that memory card will be listed. We can highlight the ones we want to transfer and then hit the import button. Just keep in mind, sometimes doing it this way, if iOS does not support the video file, you may get an error.

Once you’re done transferring, all the video files will be listed in your gallery, and you can go ahead and share them or edit them or whatever you need to do with them.

The other way to transfer to your iPad or iPhone is by using the “Files” app. And that’s actually my preferred method because I like to be able to organize the content. And doing it this way is also a little more forgiving when it comes to file formats and resolutions that currently aren’t supported under iOS.

Even though you can’t play them on iOS apps, like Luma Fusion, tend to be able to read those files, and you can still edit them. So, what we’re going to do is launch our “Files” app, and again, on the side here, you can see we have a device called “Untitled.”

That’ll be the memory card there. We can then go in and browse it, and just like before, there’s all our media files. We can then go ahead and select them, and then we can just move them over to a folder on our hard drive.

So, that’s my preferred method of transferring content from something like the DJI Mini 3 Pro over to an iPad or iPhone. It’s quick and easy, and it just works really well.

Transferring content from your mini drone to a laptop or desktop

Now, using a card reader works the same on a laptop or desktop, whether you’re using a Windows-based machine or an Apple product. Again, you can just use a card reader. I have this one here. It’s Lexar. I got it free with a memory card years ago, but it works just fine.

You can take your memory card, plug it in, and of course, you can get ones that have a USB-C interface if that’s what you need. And then just plug it into a USB-C port, and right away, you’ll hear that sound that a new drive has been detected.

So, we’ll open up our computer, and as you can see, there it is there. There’s the memory card, and there are all our files. We can now just bring it over to any drive that we want. So, that works well.

Transfer content directly from the DJI Mini 3 Pro drone

But what happens if you’re on vacation, and you don’t have a memory card reader with you. But you want to upload some content to your smartphone or your tablet, so you can share it with some family or post it to social media?

In that case, you can use the drone itself and use it just like a card reader. All we’re going to do is plug the USB-C from the back of the drone into our device. And then again, it’ll pop up, and we can transfer content directly over. Now, this only works with USB-C to an iPad. It does not work going to an iPhone with Lightning.

I’m not sure about Android. I don’t own any Android products, so I haven’t ever tested that. But I’ll just do a quick demonstration for you here. We’ll power the drone on, as you can see, and we’ll now plug the other end of the cable into our device.

Now, if we go ahead and launch our “Files” app again, and you’re going to notice we actually have two drives listed now, and that’s because the DJI Mini 3 Pro actually has a bit of internal storage.

It’s not very much, and unfortunately, it doesn’t list which one is which. So, you’re just going to have to click on them and determine which one is the internal and which one is the memory card.

So if we click on this top one here and go into the DCIM folder, you can see all our media. However, if I click on the other one, again going to the DCIM folder, you can see it’s empty. There’s nothing stored on there. At this point, we would just select all our files again and then move them over to whatever directory we want.

If you want to preview a file before you transfer it over, you can bring it up and play it. Currently, it’s playing right off the drone. And again, we can also transfer directly from the drone over to the Photos app.

We launched the Photos app, under devices there it says Untitled again. Now it’s reading all the media that’s stored on the memory card that we have connected to the iPad.

Now, I’m just going to demonstrate here transferring over to a laptop. This works whether you’re using a PC, a Windows-based machine, or a MacBook or any kind of desktop.

You can just plug your USB cable into the back of the drone and then use either a USB-A or USB-C, depending on what you’re plugging it into. We’ll just plug it in there right away. You can hear it’s detected a new drive. If we go to our computer, you can see we have the two drives listed.

One is the internal storage and one is the memory card. Again, you may just have to go into it to figure out which one is which, but if we go in there, you can see here are all our files. Again, we can just transfer them over.

Using Quick Transfer to move photos and video files from the DJI Mini 3 Pro

Now, the last way to do it is using a feature called “Quick Transfer.” Now, to use “Quick Transfer,” you have to utilize the DJI Fly App. Now, if you’re using the DJI RC, you may not have the DJI Fly app installed on your phone or on your iPad because you don’t really need it.

But what you’ll have to do is go ahead and download it to your iPad or whatever device you want to connect to. You don’t have to power on your controller, just make sure your drone is powered. You can see right away, when we launched the Fly app, the little box came up at the bottom, and it’s asking us if we would like to switch to Quick Transfer mode.

So, what we’re going to do is hit switch. It’s then going to ask us to join the network that the DJI Mini 3 Pro is broadcasting. As you can see here, we got confirmation. It’s now connected.

So, what we’re going to do is click View album. And as you can see here, we can scroll through and everything we have on the current memory card will be displayed.

We can select a few items, and then all we have to do is hit the download button here at the bottom. And you can see at the top here we do get a progress bar showing us the current state of transfer.

So transferring this way is rapid as well, and some people will find it very convenient.

My preferred way to transfer content from my DJI Mini 3 Pro drone

At the end of the day, though, I find the quickest and easiest way is just to pick up a card reader. You can get some fairly inexpensive ones on Amazon. You can just plug it right into your device, transfer everything over rapidly, and you don’t have to worry about powering on your drone at all.

Folks, that’s basically it for this “Fastest Way To Transfer Content From Your DJI Mini 3 Pro Drone” video. Hopefully, you enjoyed it and got some value. Give it a thumbs up if you did. It’s always greatly appreciated.

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