Q: My wife wants some of the photos off the camera on her phone. I've copied them onto my MAC and now want to download them to her phone.  I do not want to sync all of her photos onto my mac. How do I simply put them on her phone?

Welcome to the Apple community. 

Why not Airdrop them.

Use AirDrop to send files from your Mac to another nearby Mac or iOS device - Apple Support

It isn't required as such, there are other ways, I just thought Airdrop was the easiest for you.

My airport card is junk on the Wife's MacBook, it's near full, 3 gig available of 250 potential.... trying to use the iPhone as a drive to port the pictures over to the p.c. for storage (it has 500g available... and is slowly becoming the file dump with a huge second drive)

with the MacBookPro not syncing to WiFi, it's tethered, Air Drop doesn't seem to work...

What are my options?

MBPro > 6+ > P.C. is the direction I'm trying for.

My wife has iPhone 4 and she does not have airdrop. All I want is to add some photos from camera to her iPhone. Why is it so difficult. Why do I have to go through iTunes which threatens to delete all the existing photos. I do not want to use iCloud. Why can we not have the phone as another drive in finder.

It is ridiculously painful.

I'm afraid those are your 2 main options. iOS does not allow for direct access to the file system. Never has. This is why you can't mount the phone as a drive.

I don't believe iTunes is threatening you, but probably informing you that the selection of photos in your current sync operation will *replace* the photos that are on the phone now. This may not be an issue if you are just adding photos and the already synced photos are still selected.

Is there a reason you don't want to use iCloud?

You can always use an app like Dropbox, or simply email them to her on the phone and retrieve/save them there.

And the answer is trivial - connect the phone to the Mac and use iTunes sync - Sync your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iTunes on your computer using USB - Apple Support

Or connect the phone via WiFi and use iTunes sync - Sync your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iTunes using Wi-Fi - Apple Support

Those are the ways you have available - the fact that you want something that does not exist is your problem, no one else's - the solution is available and simple - you choose to use it or not and the consequences  of your decision are totally your own

LN