Meet LocalSend - A Cross-Platform, Open Source Alternative to AirDrop and Quick Share!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ส.ค. 2024
- LocalSend is a free and open source application that securely transfers files between devices without the internet. It's cross-platform meaning that it's available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS (iPhone, iPad), and Android devices. This is a great alternative to AirDrop or Quick Share and can send and receive files to other devices without a 3rd party service like Google Drive.
I used LocalSend around 20x while creating this video and all transfers went flawless!
Video Notes: technotim.live/posts/localsend/
LocalSend: github.com/localsend/localsend
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00:00 - What problem am I trying to solve?
00:54 - LocalSend
01:48 - Installing on Windows
02:59 - Application Walk-though
03:59 - Installing on iOS
05:00 - Installing on Android
05:56 - Installing on Linux
07:36 - Installing on macOS
08:15 - App is Built with Flutter
08:47 - Windows to iOS
10:02 - iOS to Android
10:45 - Android to Linux
11:25 - Linux to macOS
12:05 - macOS to Windows
12:52 - This Video Almost Wasn't
13:20 - LocalSend + Docker?
Thank you for watching! - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
A few tips after playing with this for a bit:
- It works on external/mobile networks with a wireguard connection to home (enable Quick Save on your home device to auto accept)
- Enabling the auto start, quick save, and minimize to tray options on desktop allows this to act as a background service
- A mapped network drive can be used as the save destination
So now with these set up, I have an extremely fast way to drop files on my NAS from anywhere in the world using my phone. Awesome!
you should make a video on this
i could not get it work over wireguard. my phone and pc are on different networks, so thought this will be a solution, but they can't see each other
@@demorez5 dang, I think yt filtered my reply. I'll try again without ips... try adding this to your wg interface settings, and substitute WIREGUARD_SUBNET with your wg subnet address:
PostUp=iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s WIREGUARD_SUBNET/24 -o br0 -j MASQUERADE
PostDown=iptables -t nat -D POSTROUTING -s WIREGUARD_SUBNET/24 -o br0 -j MASQUERADE
@@demorez5 ahhh I just tried twice and my reply got filt ered both times 😒 in lieu of my actual configs, look up the "how to set up wireguard firewall rules in linux" article on cyberciti, particularly the nat masquerade section, to add as postup/postdown wg interface settings
@@demorez5 look up "wireguard postup nat masquerade" I tried posting instructions here but it won't go thru
I've been using LocalSend for about a year now with no issues between Mac, MS, iPhone, iPad, & Linux (several distros - desktops and Raspberry Pis). Made a contribution to devs. It is that good and that easy. And I am retired and cheap :~)
It seems great!
defo gonna do the same, the app is fantastic. i've always had a bit of an issue transferring files in between devices.
Yeah, I've been using it for about 6 months. I had only one issue where if I try to send a huge file, it gets stuck in loading the file for sending. However, you can workaround it by sharing a folder that contains the huge file. Apparently it's an issue with Flutter.
@@aaronplays_ LocalSend, on my Android phone freezes when trying to send 1776 pictures of approximately 17GB from my phone to my Windows10 Pro PC! So, it can't handle such a large chunk of files!🤨
@@vla2uv put the files in a single folder and share the folder. In the Send section, you'll find options for File, Media, Text, Folder and Apps. Select Folder and pick the folder containing your files.
I also had freezing when trying to share 14GB of files. I checked the GitHub issues and found the workaround there. Apparently this is an issue with Flutter and they're working to fix it.
I like that you mention how it's developed using Flutter. It's interesting and could inspire some people who may be contemplating a multi-platform framework for their next project.
Just for the sake of it you could do a sha256 sum of original and roudtrip file at the end to prove that they are the same but still great video, thanx Tim. 👍
I have been looking for something like this for a while. Thanks for bringing it some attention!!
Perfect timing! I was looking for a Snapdrop/Pairdrop replacement literally just a couple of hours before you posted this. Thanks!
Finally an excellent app for sharing files between devices. I was looking for so many apps to work seamlessly. Even the google quick share has slow speeds and loses the transfer while sending large files. A huge kudos for the devs.
LocalSend, on my Android phone freezes when trying to send 1776 pictures of approximately 17GB from my phone to my Windows10 Pro PC! So, it can't handle such a large chunk of files!🤨
amazing! i've been looking for something like this for a long time - you're always coming in clutch. thanks, tim!
Yes it is great. I've been using syncthing.
Dude! This is great! Thanks for all the stuff you do, you have no idea how much time your channel has saved my home lab setup
The magic of Flutter baby
This is amazing!!!!! Thank you so much
The fact that it doesn't require internet and it does not consume a lot of resources running in the background is amazing.
Thank you for sharing this Tim. No more sending pics through email getting them from one device to another.
Wow, great video. Aways been bug bear for me about sending files locally. Definitely gonna give this a go. Thx for all the work done.
You always find services that I didn't know I needed. Another great video man, you're the GOAT in this space.
Thanks for this nice video Tim. I will give localSend a try. I'm already using Projectsend to send files to external locations, so this will make my file management complete.
I've been using the quick share app from google on my windows machines but this looks neat. I swear everytime i watch a video from you I end up adding more software to my list of "check out" lol.
Btw you can and probably should install .deb packages with apt and not dpkg. Using apt it'll automatically do the dependency resolution and install missing ones.
Thanks for pointing this out! I've been using Signal Note to Self to send files to myself on different platforms. Being 100% local I prefer this.
Thank you for this one Tim! Excellent solution.
Hello. I'm hard-core Fedora, Android (and reluctantly Windows) and I never ran into this useful app. I never liked uploading & downloading files to a cloud drive as a copy conduit. This is excellent. Thank you for this video uploader. 💚
Thank you for sharing this! I will test this app. It is a little clever app!
I have three OS:es Windows, mac, Linux and an Android tablet. When I want to share files I find that just email to myself is the easiest! Now I have a good alternative!
Thank you for this Tim, I've wanted exactly this, for years!
Wow, looks like a lovely clean app. Great demo - have installed already! 🎉
I think it speaks volumes for us nerds when we're super excited about sharing files locally xD Great video, thank you! Installilng this as we speak^^
Excellent advice, works beautifully! Had to restart my IPhone to make it appear in the share menu.
Excellent Timing! I actually asked about trying to do something similar on your Discord a week or two ago. I was looking for a Docker based app. But I didn't want or need the files to be stored in an internal database. I wanted them stored in a plain share. And my usage case was iPhone to CIFS Share then to Windows. I think this solution will be the best out of everything that I've found so far as i'd looked at NextCloud, SyncThing, etc. Although like you if they end up with a Docker container or some provision to set up an "auto accept" that would be even better for my usage case.
I just checked it out. There is a “quick save” setting that allows you to set up a device to auto accept incoming files.
Super helpful, been using some random app on the appstore to send photos from my phone over to my PC and it worked okay, but this is way nicer and has no ads.
Thank you. This is the tool I have been looking for.
Great video Tim! Thanks for sharing it with us!💖👍😎JP
This is great, was using KDE Connnect for a long time but it stopped working on windows a while back, this should do fine for my use
Fantastic. Will install right away. Thanks
This is the app that I have been searching for a long time. I hope it stays open source-free. Thanks, man. :)
..‘I hope it stays open source-free’ .. yeah, heaven forbid the software author/developer might make a buck or two off the 100,000’s of users.
And users wonder why so many ‘FREEE!!’ Apps end up dead. “But It’s FREEE!”..
@@ernestgalvan9037 Yea, don't mind paying a buck or 2 to the developer.
such an amazing presentation, thanks for this.
In my watch list for some time, thank you for testing it for me 🙂
pretty cool, sent a file to my steamdeck (from windows) and only took me about 5 minutes to get setup and running, very smooth. speed is pretty decent over my wifi @~ 15MB/sec which is about half of most of my SMB transfers, but you can’t really beat the ease of this.
yeah the speed is surprisingly slow. It may be device related or something going on with network config but around 6months ago or more, I was transferring at 55-65MB/s. It's now mostly 15MB/s to 22MB/s. I have tried many devices with linux, mac os, windows, android, iPhone and there isn't any pattern which lets me know how fast the transfer will be. Generally it will be 15-20MB/s but sometimes on certain devices it starts at and maintains 55-65MB/s consistently every time for the entire duration of large transfers. LocalSend does also crash sometimes and does need a better notification system which lets the user know if the transfer stopped and so on. But it's an amazing app with no ads and is open-source. I know theoretical maximums are very different but with wifi cards at 150MB/s (1200mbps) and disk read and write speeds at 2000MB/s+, getting 50MB/s transfer rate should be the base line otherwise something is going wrong. I have experimented with firewalls (on/off), ethernet on one device and wireless on other, wireless to wireless (wifi 6, wifi 5), encryption (on/off). Interestingly, one device on ethernet to router and other device wireless had no noticeable impact whatsoever on transfer speed or reliability. I want wireless speeds for transfers to improve as well as their reliability big time but most of all I want full fibre installed in my location ffs. 200mbps for a p2p connection isn't really decent at all considering 200mbps is so easily achievable between 2 devices (one could be on the other side of the Earth) with an internet connection. 1gbps is easily do-able between 2 devices anywhere in the world. So 200mbps p2p, there's definitely something going wrong here. Some sort of bottleneck which I'm sure can easily be corrected.
nice one dude! really practical litte tool. thank you.
Kudos! Great find.
This video came at an awesome time, I was struggling to find any solution.
Thanks for a nontrivial demo! Many app reviews just show a trivial hello world use case and don't demonstrate a cross platform complicated scenario.
love the vid! thanks tim
hey thanks a lot i wanted something similar as well, i ended up finding syncthing for my solution but this works great, since syncthing more or less like permanent way of syncing within your devices this works great for let's suppose sending something from my friends device
OMG! Thank you so much! I was looking for this for years! I got Macs and Windows machine at home and my office, and I hate iPhone, i use a Galaxy S22 there was no way to get something like this!
Would be cool if it had a pair key between machines.
In the office space where there are snoopy colleagues (acting like 5 year olds) would be just trying to send you files all the time etc. a pairing key would possibly keep anyone else outside of the sharing circle as it wouldn’t be discoverable, and just leaving in those who have to be in the know, something like a hidden network.
Really great solution for transferring between devices that was a pain before.
Pretty good video and application, thank you
A neat application. I've just been using SyncThing to accomplish a similar task, but this would be good for one off file transfers.
It's nice but you still need the devices to be on the same network.
This would be a lot better if someone finally implements Nerby Share protocol (with WiFi direct and Bluetooth) on other platforms
To transfer large files over Bluetooth is just not a good idea even if it turns out to be feasible. BT file transfer is okay for small amounts of data only.
@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 That's right, however when not on the same network devices can find each other over bluetooth and negotiate wifi direct connection. That's how Nerby Share works on Android
Will this also work across different subnets or is it only relying on broadcast / multicast?
Hell yeah, LocalSend is awesome, glad it's getting recognition.
Nice! I use unison file synchronizer for my linux systems, configured to run as a daemon on startup. I normally don't have a problem just using Dropbox, but sometimes I'm running a simulation and I have tens or hundreds of gigs of video frames that I want to pull to my main pc. Maybe I'll try localsend next time I'm working on something like that!
Oh this is going to be soooooooo much easier than plugging in a data cable and navigating through the file system.
Great vid so useful thank you
excellent find
thanks, it help me a lot
Already loving this software. Its very fast.
Does it require to stay on same WiFi network or can be an ad hoc connection like airdrop?
It requires you to be on the same network connection. I think it uses the network connection to transfer data p2p. It might just use the network to identify devices available on the network before being able to establish a connection between them like airdrop but I don't think it does unfortunately. Its dependant on the network sadly.
It seems that there is no info at all about the file before you accept to reciev it? Im not sure i like that. I know you are prob just sending to your self or a friend/family member, but still would be nice to see file name, size, hash etc.
This is how everything should work. Great app!!! The best of a kind
I have snapdrop installed on my home server and using it well, but it only works in certain situations and I am looking for a replacement. Any suggestions for a good replacement that can also be used on an external network would be appreciated, of course.
Do the devices always have to be in the same WiFi network
Thanks for the demo and info, awesome. I am sending you a Thumbs Up! LOL
I've been using Warpinator for this. Does localsend support cli mode as well?
Another shout for Warpinator. It does pretty much the same thing as Localsend and has been around for quite a while now.
The app seems to be borked on MacOS Big Sur - it installs but just opens to a blank window. I tried the app store and the direct download .dmg installs. I might give homebrew a try but really I was looking for something to share files with my non-techy family and they're not up to managing homebrew and run a mile at the sight of a terminal. :(
64MB/s or 512Mbps is slow for a gigabit connection over your lan...was the linux machine or mac using a spinning disk?
I transfered files (videos) from windows 10 to Iphone 15 Pro Max. The photos app does not show the videos. Don't know why?
You say it uses local network and not internet. What does it mean? I do not understand how does to device exchange information without bluetooth or internnet?
Not sure if anyone mentioned it, but have you run checksums on the files to make sure they are identical? Probably are but its far better than playing video.
does this actually use your wifi network, or just device wifi and bluetooth. for instance, AirDrop creates a peer-to-peer connection
This is excellent!
Also another tip You can use this app with tailscale as well since it uses IPs to connect i just figured out that it can transfer files without even on the same since you are on the tailnet there it’s really good tool for remote transfer as well Thanks.
useful, thanks
Since syncthing doesn't have an app for iPhone this would be a great addition.
i dont know what im doing wrong but my devices on the same network cant find each other using localsend apps both on windows 11 and android phone
Just set-up an SMB share. I can access everything on my file server on every device. With a VPN server hosted on my LAN, I can tunnel in from anywhere in the world.
Do your devices need to be in the same subnet? Anyone get it to work across VLANs?
You should look at video quality and hash to see if they stay the same
does localsend work without having the same wifi connected?
e.g. transfer files outside without wifi.
Short answer is no. The long answer is maybe, assuming you have a properly set up VPN. Out of all of these easy file transfer solutions, SyncThing s the only one that will work over the internet as well as it does on a LAN.
why is paidrop no longer on github? Im still hosting a docker with it. maybe time to stop that if its no longer updated.
What about something that doesn't required a shared wifi connection like quickshare or airdrop?
i cant find a nearby device, and both devices are on the same wifi. pls help!
I dont know why but when I play this video I can use PiP on my android without premium. Its only when I play this video. Can anyone explain?
What about Intel Unison? I've been using it for quite some time without any issues. Works on all devices.
What about Warpinator? I'm using it on Android, Win 11 and Linux boxes
wormhole style clients are great, too.
Thankyou for a guide. I've been using Syncthing for a while but it's quite buggy for quick send between smartphone and desktop (Windows i'm looking at you buddy :D )
very interesting!
Anyone know where the save location for a non-media file is, on an IOS device?
Since this is only on the Local Network and not Peer to peer like AirDrop, wouldn’t it be simpler to just enable File Sharing over the network directly from the operating system? I wouldn’t use this to send stuff between my own devices, but still it’s an option to send stuff to friends without giving them full access to all your files I guess.
Thanks
You should have done an md5sum at the end to confirm lossless transfer (which definitely should have been, otherwise something is really wrong) but just for giggles 😂
This is really cool, but I'm happy I have a Synology NAS; it solves this problem seamlessly regardless of OS
So do you always have to get permission from the other computer to send a file, or can you bypass that?
You can auto accept. It’s in settings. I think it’s called quick send!
@@TechnoTim Cool !
Amazing app
Hey guys. I just setup snapdrop in my network. I like the convenience of not installing any app on the client. What are the problems with snapdrop and how does localsend solve it?
Also, any drawbacks using localsend?
great app, thanks video. how use on ubuntu server?
Wouldn't it be easier to use sudo apt install ./fileName.deb to handle the installation and dependencies simultaneously?
I am not quite sure why not stick up with with Android's Quick Share since it officially supported on Windows, open sourced and imported to Linux MacOS etc.
Amazing!!!, save my transfers!!! xD
Invest in modern Wi-Fi access point. I had the same experience while using Quick Share to PC.
interesting. This won't work if wifi and Lan devices are on a different vlan as this this app requires mDNS.