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While digging around for a native solution to easily drag and drop pictures from my Mac directly to my iPhone, I stumbled upon the fact that Image Capture has the ability to share imaging devices connected to your Mac.

This would be useful for something like a small office setting with one scanner, which all users could access from their Macs rather than having to use the one machine the scanner is connected to.  This works for almost any imaging device, including the iPhone.

With your iPhone connected, launch Image Capture and select Devices>Browe Devices… from the menu bar.  Select your iPhone and click the Sharing… button at the bottom of the window.  Next, check the Share my devices and Enable Web Sharing boxes.  Provide a shared name, a password (optional) and click OK.  You’ll now notice a Shared checkbox for your iPhone.  Check it to share your phone.

Click Sharing.. once again.  You’ll now notice an IP address underneath the Web Sharing check box.  Open your web browser of choice and type in the IP address, including the port number (the numbers after the colon).  You are now browsing the pictures on your iPhone (and any other devices shared with Image Capture) through your web browswer!  Note, this is an internal IP address and will only work on your local network, but it’s a great way to share your pictures with others on your LAN.

I only have a few gripes about the iPhone, and they’re the usual suspects.  Of all the ones that won’t be corrected next month (3G and Exchange support), the biggest for me is the lack of support for sending and recieving MMS messages.

Until Apple adds this functionality, I’ve come up with a workaround.  It’s not pretty, but it works.  I’m sure others have thought of this too, but I wanted to share the process, along with an extra tip at the end.

To send a picture message, simply create a new email, attach a photo, and send it to your recipient’s mobile email address.  Most people I pix message are Verizon customers, so they would be xxxxxxxxxx@vzwpix.com.  The 10 x’s are their mobile number.  I beleive AT&T customers would be xxxxxxxxxx@cingularme.com.  For other carriers, a quick Google search should return what you need.  I’ve added these mobile email addresses to each person’s contact info in Address Book so I have it quickly available when I want to send them an MMS.

Receiving a picture is where the downsides comes in to play.  Your friends have to remember to address their pix message to whatever email account you have access to through iPhone’s Mail application.  The people who send me picture messages most frequently have learned to send it to my email address rather than my mobile phone number, but for people who don’t know this and send me a picture message, I still get the SMS with a name and password for viewmymessage.com.  I just reply to those and tell them to resend the pix message to my email address.

Also, unless you have your iPhone set to check for new mail every 15 minutes, it could be a while before you even know you’ve got a picture waiting for you.

So there it is, a bit cumbersome in places, but it gets the job done.

One final tip, I use gmail as my primary email address.  Since this is the address I tell friends to send MMS messages to, I created a filter to apply the label ‘Pix Message’ to any email from ‘@vzwpix.com.’  This way I can tag all my MMS messages that come through gmail and organize them for later viewing, adding to iPhoto, etc.