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Here's the trick to add an AirDrop folder to your Mac's Dock

You can't add AirDrop to the MacOS Dock. Or can you?

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
Matt Elliott
Matt Elliott/CNET

AirDrop is the fastest and easiest way to shuttle files and photos between iPhones and Macs. I use it to send screenshots from my iPhone to my Mac. I use it less frequently to send files from my Mac to my iPhone or another Mac, and each time I do, I dig around for it before giving up and using Spotlight to open it. AirDrop is strangely omitted from the MacOS Dock, and there's no clear way to add it. Thanks to this How To Geek post, I discovered a roundabout way to add an AirDrop icon to your Mac's Dock for even faster and easier AirDropping.

Here's how:

  • Open Finder, click Go in the menu bar, and choose Go to Folder.
finder-go-to-folder
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET
  • Enter /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Applications/ and click Go.
mac-airdrop-folder
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET
  • Drag the AirDrop icon from the Finder folder to your Dock and drop it.
drag-airdrop-to-dock
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

Now, you've got a super-fast way to open an AirDrop window to quickly send files from your Mac.

And for the record, the fastest way to open AirDrop -- without adding it to your Dock -- is to use Spotlight, ask Siri, or open Finder and then click AirDrop in the left panel.