Hi all,

I’m wondering if anyone has any suggestions for a (ideally) FOSS app that can help me transfer a large amount of files between mobile devices. The exact scenario I’m trying to solve for is transferring large amount of pictures and videos from a family member’s iPhone to my Android mobile phone.

I’ve tried a few solutions (see below list) but they all had some short coming or issue. I would ideally love something that has a mobile app that can be installed, but that’s only because in my experience mobile web browsers tend to timeout / hang when dealing with a large number of file uploads at once.

  • Filerun - Filerun worked the best in my testing and, if there are no other suggestions, I’ll probably return to this one, despite it not being FOSS.
  • Pingvin - Worked the next best, but would time out more frequently than Filerun. As long as I would batch the upload to only a few hundred pictures at a time and kept the screen alive, it would handle the upload.
  • PairDrop - Loved the simplicity of this web app and not having to send or deal with share links, however I was unable to get it to send uploads of more than ~100 files at a time.
  • Immich - Honestly, a perfect solution but since I’m only trying to send select pictures between devices, way overkill. Plus, family members were uncomfortable with a solution that gave the perception that it was automatically uploading ALL of their pictures to my server.

Thanks in advance for the suggestions!

  • tripflag@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    15 hours ago

    I’ve been making copyparty, and one of the initial inspirations/usecases was exactly this one – bunch of internet-friends meeting in meatspace for some event, and needing to stream across pics/vids before we split up and maybe never meet again :-)

    You can run the server on android using termux; see the instructions in the readme for the installation part, and then run the server like so: copyparty -e2ds --qr -v /storage/emulated/0/Pictures/from-family/::w

    it will show a QR-code which you can scan from the other device to start uploading, and the folder is shared write-only (:w instead of :rw), so nobody can download anything. And it keeps track of which files have already been transferred, so the client will skip across dupes without reuploading them, and also resume interrupted uploads automatically.

    Tried sending 340 photos (1.21 GiB) from an old iPhone to an android hotspot just now; I turned off the iPhone screen as soon as it started sending, and it finished in 41 seconds, so around 30 MiB/s? Maybe there are faster alternatives… But my javascript should be fairly resilient and recover from network glitches and such, so uploading from safari like this should be fine.

    • Uncurious3512@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      7 hours ago

      Oh wow, neat program, and great job with the documentation! I’ll comb through it when I get back to my desk. Thanks for the suggestion and for the excellent program!