How to transfer files between your phone and computer

Last updated: July 29, 2026

Getting a photo, video, or document from your phone to your computer — or the other way around — should take seconds. In practice, people end up emailing files to themselves, hunting for the right cable, or signing into a cloud service. This guide shows a faster way that works between any phone and any computer, using nothing but a web browser.

The problem with the usual methods

• USB cables require the right cable and the right drivers, and iPhones in particular make folder access awkward on Windows — you see the camera roll and little else. The connection also drops when the phone locks.
• Email caps attachments at around 25 MB, so it fails for videos and large files, and it re-encodes attachments along the way.
• Cloud drives work, but they ask you to sign in, upload, sync, and wait — and your file sits on a third-party server afterwards. You also pay twice in time: once to upload, once to download.
• AirDrop is fast but only works between Apple devices, so it is no help for iPhone→Windows or Android→Mac. Quick Share has the same limitation in reverse.
• Messaging yourself is the most common workaround and the most destructive one: most apps recompress photos and video before sending.

The browser method (works on every combination)

ShareBetweenDevices connects the two devices' browsers directly, so it does not care which operating systems are involved. The steps are the same whether you are going from an iPhone to a Windows PC, an Android phone to a MacBook, or a Linux laptop to a tablet.

Sending from your phone to your computer

1. On your phone, open sharebetweendevices.com in any browser and tap Send.
2. Pick the file, photo or video you want. You can select several at once.
3. A QR code and a short PIN appear on the phone.
4. On the computer, open the same site and type the PIN — or scan the QR code if the computer has a webcam.
5. The computer shows what is arriving, with each file's size, and downloads it directly from the phone.

Sending from your computer to your phone

1. On the computer, open the site and drop the file onto the page.
2. Point the phone's camera at the QR code that appears — both iOS and Android open links straight from the camera app.
3. Accept the transfer on the phone.

Where the file ends up

This differs by platform and is the step that most often confuses people:

• Windows, macOS, Linux: the browser's normal downloads folder.
• Android: the Downloads folder. Photos and videos will not show up in the gallery timeline automatically — open Files → Downloads, or move them into the pictures folder if you want them in the gallery.
• iPhone and iPad: a Save button appears when the transfer finishes. Tapping it opens the share sheet, where you choose Save Image / Save Video for media or Save to Files for documents. iOS deliberately refuses to write files to storage without that tap.

Nothing is uploaded, and nothing is compressed

The file goes from one device to the other over an encrypted peer-to-peer connection. It is not uploaded to a server first, which is why there is no upload progress bar and no file size ceiling — a 5 GB video is the same operation as a text file, just longer.

It is also transferred as raw bytes, so nothing is re-encoded, resized, or stripped of metadata. What arrives is identical to what left, and both ends compare a checksum when the transfer finishes so you know it is intact. For photos and video this is the whole point: messaging apps routinely deliver a fraction of the original resolution and bitrate.

Making it fast

Put both devices on the same Wi-Fi network. The transfer then runs at local network speed and never touches your internet connection — for a 1 GB file, that is tens of seconds rather than many minutes. If the two devices cannot reach each other directly, the transfer still works but falls back to a relay and is limited by your upload speed. The app tells you which one you are on while the transfer runs.

If you see "Relayed" on two devices that share a network, the usual causes are a VPN, a guest Wi-Fi network that isolates devices from each other, or one device having quietly fallen back to mobile data. The full breakdown is in why file transfers are slow.

Practical notes

• Keep both screens awake. Phones suspend background tabs, and a suspended tab stops the transfer. Leave the browser in the foreground on both devices.
• Both sides must be open at the same time. There is no stored copy waiting on a server, so this is a live handover rather than a drop box.
• Check free space on the receiving device before moving several gigabytes.
• iPhone photos may arrive as HEIC, which older Windows versions cannot open. The fix, and the video equivalent, are covered in the iPhone to Windows guide.

Related guides

For a specific pairing, see iPhone to Windows PC or Android to iPhone. For very large files, see sending large files without uploading and sending video without losing quality. If something is not working, start with the troubleshooting guide.

Try it now — nothing to install on either device.

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