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How to receive WhatsApp photos on an iPad (2019)

2019-03-11
by Olivier Cleynen

(I write out those very instruc­tions which I couldn’t find, in the hope they can help oth­er families)

My grand­moth­er uses an iPad and likes to receive pho­tos of her grand- and great-grand­chil­dren. We used to send her pho­tos by email, but this has two short­com­ings. First, sav­ing and retriev­ing attach­ment pho­tos on the iPad is dif­fi­cult, so that in prac­tice they even­tu­al­ly get buried down the email list. And sec­ond, just like in every fam­i­ly around here, most pho­tos end up being tak­en with smart­phones and shared on mes­sag­ing apps instant­ly, rather than for­ward­ed by email.

As of 2019, it is pos­si­ble to con­fig­ure an iPad to receive What­sApp pho­tos. The caveats are that it is expen­sive, and that there are no cap­tions, no dates, and no noti­fi­ca­tions. Nev­er­the­less, the pho­tos are saved in the iPad pho­to app, sort­ed by receiv­ing date, and eas­i­ly acces­si­ble by an elderly.

The first step is to buy a recent iPhone. I set­tled for a 45€ iPhone 5c on eBay. The iPhone is con­nect­ed to a Wi-Fi net­work and What­sApp is installed on it. No SIM card must ever be insert­ed in the iPhone. When set­ting up What­sApp, it is suf­fi­cient to receive con­fir­ma­tion codes on a sep­a­rate mobile phone. The phone num­ber of that sep­a­rate phone will become the con­tact phone num­ber to which every­one will send What­sApp pho­tos. After the set up, an active phone con­nec­tion is nev­er needed.

Sec­ond, both the iPhone and the iPad are con­fig­ured to syn­chro­nize pho­tos via iCloud. Any pho­to on one becomes acces­si­ble on the other.

Third, What­sApp on the iPhone is con­fig­ured to auto­mat­i­cal­ly save pho­tos to the Pho­to app. Note that pho­tos are only saved when What­sApp is the active app on the screen. For this to hap­pen, the iPhone must be con­fig­ured so that the screen is per­ma­nent­ly on. I reduced the screen bright­ness to a min­i­mum, plugged the phone into a charg­er, and bub­ble-wrapped it. It sits there in a cor­ner of the apart­ment, receiv­ing pho­tos in the back­ground, with no inter­ac­tion need­ed. This has been work­ing for three months now.

Again, no cap­tions or asso­ci­at­ed text mes­sages are sent over to the iPad. Also, the dates are some­how lost, and pho­tos will show up sort­ed by date of arrival no mat­ter what. Final­ly, no noti­fi­ca­tion of any kind is received on the iPad.

The purist in me frowns at the com­plex­i­ty and awk­ward­ness of the set­up. But in this case, it is the result that mat­ters. If you have ever seen how much joy comes from receiv­ing a pho­to of the youngest fam­i­ly mem­ber, you will know what I mean.

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(more by Olivier: articles, thermodynamique, fluid mechanics, mécanique newtonienne)