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Comment by FerretFred | Hacker News Reader

Check out LocalSend - it's multi platform. I use this all the time.

Thanks, I've been emailing myself photos in Gmail 5-6 at a time like a caveman for the past several years... any app I tried was a non-cross-platform disaster or cost too much and had major feature bloat. This looks dead simple.

I use KDE Connect for that. It's cross platform despite the name. It has other features but you can turn those off so it only transfers files.

Same, uploading to google drive.

SyncThing is a much better solution for that too.

For SyncThing-Fork has better options for controlling syncing based on network, battery level, etc.

What sucks is that there's no foolproof way to make sure it keeps running. Not so much of an issue for a techie, but I tried to use it so my mom's photos keep getting backed up, and I have to remind her at least once a month to start it again. And that's despite having all the energy saving stuff disabled for the app, and having Autostart allowed. I don't know whether there's still some heuristic to kill apps that run in the background and haven't been interacted with in X days or something.

And then, at least on my phone, it rarely seems to goof up when the app starts the actual syncthing process. Syncthing-fork then just keeps showing "syncthing is starting up" on the status page and the battery drains quickly. It's still the best solution imo to have your photos reliably get backed up no matter where on this planet you are without resorting to Google/$PHONE_MANUFACTURER Cloud.

That's unusual if that's the case, in my experience. I rely on syncthing to keep my notes synced between devices/applications (and photos) and using "run according to time schedule" for "5 minutes" has never produced a problem for me, through reboot and months between opening the app sometimes.

Fellow caveman here. That's the way I've been doing it for years also, haha. Just tried Sharedrop.io mentioned in another post on HN and it works great if your phone and computer are on the same network (make sure your VPN is off if you have one).

Just plugging tour phone in (eg. with the charging cable) will do the trick, though on Apple-hardware, you'll need to install OpenMTP (https://github.com/ganeshrvel/openmtp) or somesuch.

If you meant more freely aharing than that: apologies, misunderstood. But isn't that the problem Dropbox solved?

It's not an Airdrop competitor if it doesn't even meet the basic requirement of Airdrop - to be able to arbitrarily send a file to someone without being on the same network.

I only ever see to send files between my devices in the same network, using Airdrop, so LocalSend does the job for me...

I understand that, and LocalSend looks great for what it does. But AirDrop is so insanely useful to many of us because it allows us to share a large file with a person, regardless of whether we are on the same network or whether there is a network at all. If you need that and you can't, it's quite frustrating.

The original post was about being an AirDrop alternative, which it really wasn't.

Nitroshare also runs in most places.

It's missing phone apps though. Great on on desktops.

I see Nitroshare on f-droid.

I've had somebody install it from Play to move some things.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.nitroshare.android/

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