One other benefit, if it happens to matter to you, is that Airdropped files like photos or videos retain their original quality as opposed to taking a slight hit to quality when being transferred via text or email.
Also good to know is that if you crop a picture in your iOS photos app and then airdrop it to someone, they can undo the crop in their photos app. It is a non-obviously non-destructive operation.
I am not sure as I mostly use android. Perhaps there is an app to help with that. On android, I use an app called Imagepipe[0] as the default app for sharing/opening images. It crops images destructively and removes exif information.
Make sure you select the “All Photos Data” in the Options, right at the top showing the selection in the share sheet. This has to be, somewhat annoyingly, done each time one Airdrops photos/videos.
