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How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

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Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#281

Post by pnutjam »

phh wrote: post #205
jeroenhd wrote: post #47

Writing code is fun, but I can't find much of a downside with Bluetooth here. "You can accidentally turn it on" (fair, I guess?) "and it drains battery like crazy" (it shouldn't unless you have a very buggy device) don't seem like that bad compared to Yet Another File Sharing App. I remember way back in the Android 4 era, my phone and my tablet both supported some "standard" form of WiFi Direct. It worked intuitively…

Yes, this is killing me. I have a colleague that told me "on iPhones I can super easily share files to someone else", and I'm like "20 years ago sharing files across devices was a non-issue, because we had STANDARDS (ok maybe 17-18 years ago rather). Sharing files wasn't considered a feature worth mentioning because every phone supported this out of the box (well not exactly, so the feature was having Bluetooth). Tec…

KDE connect is my goto for sharing between phone and computer.

Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#282

Post by pnutjam »

jeroenhd wrote: post #47

Writing code is fun, but I can't find much of a downside with Bluetooth here. "You can accidentally turn it on" (fair, I guess?) "and it drains battery like crazy" (it shouldn't unless you have a very buggy device) don't seem like that bad compared to Yet Another File Sharing App. I remember way back in the Android 4 era, my phone and my tablet both supported some "standard" form of WiFi Direct. It worked intuitively…

KDE connect handles this pretty well.

Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#283

Post by jmrm »

NotPractical wrote: post #254
jeroenhd wrote: post #47

Writing code is fun, but I can't find much of a downside with Bluetooth here. "You can accidentally turn it on" (fair, I guess?) "and it drains battery like crazy" (it shouldn't unless you have a very buggy device) don't seem like that bad compared to Yet Another File Sharing App. I remember way back in the Android 4 era, my phone and my tablet both supported some "standard" form of WiFi Direct. It worked intuitively…

Bluetooth is really slow, that's the main drawback. WiFi Direct is a really great technology but unfortunately it is as simple as its name implies: it's a peer-to-peer version of WiFi. It establishes a connection between two devices, but you need to do everything else (like figuring out how to send files over the socket) yourself. There are plenty of cross-platform apps that implement WiFi Direct file sharing though.

What I find weird is how easy to use is (was?) Wi-Fi Direct between Android phones and how this isn't a common thing in Windows or other non-mobile OSs.

I have just Discovered Windows 10 have Wi-Fi Direct if you have both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adapters, and it's as easy as enabling it and right clicking a file to share it. It's a shame this isn't common knowledge nowadays

Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#284

Post by pnutjam »

aspyct wrote: post #136

I regularly have to send files to customers, from a few megabytes to a few gigs. It's incredibly hard. Mail? Goes to spam. WeTransfer? Mail clients break URL. Download from my website? Some stupid browser will display the zip data onscreen. Send the link through messenger? Messenger breaks the link. SaaS gallery? Some file managers can't open the zip file. I've been doing that for two years now. Still don't have a 10…

I've been meaning to setup something like this for awhile. https://github.com/eikek/sharry

Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#285

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

I recently discovered that the Files app on iOS/iPadOS can connect to SMB servers, so my solution is to just use the NAS that I've already got. Windows, MacOS, and Linux can also connect to SMB just fine and I'd be shocked if Android couldn't also do this.

Rule 1: There are user accounts, but they're local to the NAS. I think it meets this one.

Rule 2: Setting up the NAS is likely out of reach for many non-technical users, but using the files app and doing stuff in it is perfectly reasonable. Partial marks here.

Rule 3: It's consistent in the sense that every platform uses its native file manager to connect to the NAS and manage files. Managing files on each platform is different, but you're already dealing with that difference. I'm calling it a pass.

Rule 4: The NAS is the junk in the middle, so this is a fail.

Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#286

Post by Eisenstein »

lifestyleguru wrote: post #95
mkotowski wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe LocalSend? https://localsend.org/ Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and macOS. Seems quite cross-platform. Can confirm it works smoothly for Linux and Android at the very least.

Most people will happily install entire ad package from Meta and Google, but not some unknown "LocalSend app".

I know that Meta and Google make money from data, but they are also competent, so they can be trusted to at least not get breeched or sell the data to the an aggregator.

Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#287

Post by Eisenstein »

hn_acker wrote: post #55
karaterobot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried using Wormhole and Filepizza from two devices on my network (a MacOS laptop and a Windows PC) and they just don't work for me. I assume the others use the same approach, and would probably also not work. I'm sure there's some setting I could change on my home network to make them work, but I think the point of the article is that we're looking for a way that a) just works, b) across platforms, c) even if y…

Just a sanity check: Did you turn off WebRTC and forget that you did? If you're using Firefox, setting both of the about:config flags "media.peerconnection.enabled" and "media.navigator.enabled" to false disables WebRTC. UBlock Origin's "Prevent WebRTC from leaking local IP addresses" setting also might interfere even though I don't think it turns WebRTC off. The same applies to Brave's "Disable non-proxied UDP" opti…

Don't do this is you ever use a VPN to hide your IP while browsing.

Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#288

Post by jchw »

sBqQu3U0wH wrote: post #141
jchw wrote: post #132

Bluetooth file transfer is not accessible enough for non-technical people? I mean I guess you have to mark the device you want to send to as "discoverable". If anything the real problem is that it's not very fast, but that's only an issue if you are sending particularly large files. This is still often my go-to solution aside from Tailscale's Taildrop feature.

>Bluetooth file transfer is not accessible enough for non-technical people? It's incredibly difficult. Do you have any idea how "non-technical" these "non-technical" people are? I know people that use phone every day to make calls as send messages, take photos, browse Facebook, read emails and they could not send an email with a file attachment to save their life. Asking that kind of person to: 1. Enable Bluetooth an…

lol.

You elongated this by assuming Bluetooth is disabled on both devices, which is not the default state on any OS I am aware of. The actual step list looks like this:

1. Enable Bluetooth discoverability on the target device.

2. Share file over Bluetooth on source device.

3. Accept the file transfer on target device.

You don't need to add extra steps for things like "wait", that's the same for any kind of I/O operation such as "copying a file". It's also extremely silly to add something like "Find an option to send the file". On most operating systems, it's just not that hard. On Android it's in the normal "Share" popup. So this amazingly difficult and highly technical step is to press "Share" on a file and select Bluetooth.

I could also make turning on a computer sound like a tedious seven step process if I wanted to be an asshole.

Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#289

Post by GeekyBear »

Goto80 wrote: post #203
jeroenhd wrote: post #47

Writing code is fun, but I can't find much of a downside with Bluetooth here. "You can accidentally turn it on" (fair, I guess?) "and it drains battery like crazy" (it shouldn't unless you have a very buggy device) don't seem like that bad compared to Yet Another File Sharing App. I remember way back in the Android 4 era, my phone and my tablet both supported some "standard" form of WiFi Direct. It worked intuitively…

> Writing code is fun, but I can't find much of a downside with Bluetooth here. Yesterday my son needed to transfer a video file from his Android phone to his school iPad. We tried Bluetooth, but it simply kept failing, no matter what we tried. The devices saw each other and could be paired, but file transfer didn't work at all. We tried sending the same video file to another Android phone, and it just worked on firs…

> Yesterday my son needed to transfer a video file from his Android phone to his school iPad.

The iOS version of VLC has a built in webserver you can remotely connect to for file transfers.

You connect to the iPad's IP address with any web browser and then transfer files back and forth.

https://allthings.how/vlc-player-share-files-wifi-iphone-pc/

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