You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
AirDropping a file from my iPhone 15 pro max ios18.2.1 to my Mac mini macOS 15.2 the file arrives in /private/tmp instead of ~/Downloads.
iPhone 15 Pro Max, iOS 18
Do you use Dropbox or 3rd party virus apps that might cause this:
How to change where AirDrop files are sav… - Apple Community
AirDrop download location can be tweaked with an AppleScript but check the previous thread first.
I'd suggest doing a spring cleaning:
Backup, boot to Recovery mode, erase, install, restore only user data files.
(Optionally you might 1st prepare a bootable macOS install flash drive and use that instead Recovery volume. Or do that just in case so you have a bootable volume handy).
Create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support
Then check if the AirDrop issue has been fixed.
Then install 3rd party apps but stay away from virus apps and "cleaners" that are not needed and are infamous for corrupting the system.
I use Dropbox and it has not caused problems for me so go ahead and install also it.
Thank you for your reply.
Yes, I use Dropbox. I’d already found the thread that you referenced so I suspected that Dropbox is the cause of my problem.
Unfortunately, I don’t understand the solution offered in this thread. I’m reasonably comfortable with the Mac file system and using Terminal.
Can you please describe the proposed solution in more technical and precise terms?
Thank you.
The root of my problem was not related to Dropbox; it was that I'd replaced ~/Downloads with a symlink to my external drive and apparently AirDrop will not follow the symlink.
I learned from a friend that:
It may be that AirDrop sees a symlink there and instead of following the link, it falls back to a backup location of the Unix-standard system temporary directory /tmp (which on macOS, is a symlink to /private/tmp.
Using the Finder, I deleted the symlink and replaced it with the Downloads directory that it pointed to on my external drive; drag-and-drop preserved its Extended Attributes.
I tested AirDrop from my iPhone and it still put files in /private/tmp but after power cycling and logging in fresh AirDrop placed files in ~/Downloads, as expected. (Perhaps a simple log out/in would also have worked.)
AirDrop files go to /private/tmp instead of ~/Downloads
