Connecting your smartphone or tablet to your computer by a USB cable may not bother you, but if you’re like me, you may wonder why not WiFi. If your laptop can surf the Web via WiFi and your smarphone uses the ether for pretty anything, why the cable? Why transferring your photos via USB in a world that downloads photos from Mars?
In fact, you don’t need to.
Still, it’s funny to see that Android doesn’t give this option natively. Probably, Google takes for granted that you use Google Photos only. Which is not in my case, especially when they decided to kill the gorgeous Picasa, proving that I can’t trust Google as keeper of my photos, apart from my everlasting need for backups.
Whatever, the cable must be around, and it recharges your battery for a while, adding an unnecessary recharging cycle to it.
Actually, plenty of solutions are there. If you landed on this article, you might have landed on a thousand similar as well.
But, after many rounds of testing, I picked one solution (a popular one) that works great, and it’s the one I’m showing here.
It’s an Android app: WiFi File Transfer. And it’s FREE. Uploading files greater than 5Mb requires the Pro version ($0.99, to date), but it’s not necessary for downloading your photos.
I use WiFi File Transfer for downloading photos, and it does that in a simple, fast, and reliable way. And it does much more about file transfer, if you want.
After installing the app on your smartphone or tablet, you just need to be in the same WiFi network as your PC and press start.
You’ll get an address (an URL). Just type it in the address bar of your browser on the PC and navigate to your DCIM directory by means of the user interface provided by the app, or just click on the “My Photos” tab. If you see that the URL doesn’t change across sessions (depending on your network setup), you can bookmark it in your browser.
Then, select your photos and download, as single files or zip archive. I suggest zip archive, since single files could ask multiple times for download location (depending on your browser settings).
You can also remove the files on your smartphone, once downloaded.
When you’re finished, press STOP.
Simple as that. USB cable, bye-bye.