alt Hacker NewsGetting files on and off of a phone is shockingly hard. Shockingly. It's even worse on an iPhone, if you don't have a mac. To get my photos from my iPhone to my PC, I had to first upload them to iCloud and then download them again. My phone and computer are, like, a foot away from each other but I had to send the photos across the country to some server and back just to look at them.
Replies
Oh, I use use AirDrop to myself for this. Yes, given my photo library syncs to iCloud, just opening Photos seems like it makes sense on a fast WAN which I sort-of do have, but of course, iCloud syncs only happen when the device decides the mood is just right, and can't be triggered manually, because I guess that would just be 'clutter' in the UI.
KDE Connect may work for you. (You don't have to use KDE.)
I remember in late 10s I could just connect my iPhone to a windows machine and the photos folder would be right there, mounted, with the typical iOS filenames for each picture. Is this a false memory? Maybe I was on a Mac and just forgot?
That's mostly an iPhone problem. Plugging in an Android phone still works, and wireless exchange with QuickShare also works on most devices. With Google reverse engineering Airdrop, I hope they can get the Android <-> macOS experience to finally work correctly soon as well.
Photos taken on iPhone are automatically synchronized with iCloud.. I guess you can just go to iCloud.com and download them on your PC?
If you want to send a photo to your friend from your iPhone, just click on the photo and click the "share" button, then you have many options, including sending it via Email..
What am I missing?
My only real use of Google Keep is as a cross-device clipboard.
LocalSend works really well across platforms in a LAN, no uploading to some server required.
I'm super techy but I admit that I just use Signal to send me a "Note to self" whenever I need a file from my phone on my computer quickly. For images I just use immich, but texting myself is honestly the quickest way for files because the experience is indeed terrible.
I personally just have a discord with myself as the only member. With their webhooks API you can even automate the PC side.
I emailed myself many times to transfer some files between phone and computer. I would say at least once every week.
It is a solved problem https://f-droid.org/packages/com.ismartcoding.plain/
There is also localsend, but plainapp needs to run in only one device.
You can just use Dropbox or equivalent.
Everyone emails themself stuff, that's normal. The weird part is how often will you ever need to email it specifically from your laptop, but it's already on your phone? If it's on your phone and you need to email it to someone, couldn't you just email from your phone?