LocalShare is not an anonymous company behind a logo. It is one person: I'm Niels Onderbeke, I live in Belgium, and I build and run this site on my own.
Why I built this
I built LocalShare because I found out there is no simple way to move photos from my Android phone to my MacBook. AirDrop doesn't exist outside Apple's ecosystem. A USB cable used to do it, but Apple's policy is that a Mac no longer gives you access to the memory of an Android phone as a USB storage volume. Apple also decided that file transfers over Bluetooth are no longer possible. What is left — emailing files to yourself, or uploading to Google Drive or Google Photos and downloading again on the other end — is more of a hassle than it should be: a cloud round-trip and an account, for two devices lying next to each other. All I actually needed was to move files from one device on my Wi-Fi to another, directly.
How it solves that
Open this page in a browser on both devices — Chrome on the phone, Safari or Chrome on the Mac — while they're on the same Wi-Fi. Each device shows up in the other's list automatically. Pick the files and they transfer over a direct peer-to-peer connection; the server only relays a brief handshake between the two devices to get that connection started, and only ever shows devices to each other when they're on the same local network. Nothing is uploaded anywhere in between, there's no account to create, and there's nothing to install.
Where else it's useful
The same problem shows up in a few other places: pulling a large video off a phone before a group chat compresses it into mush, handing a file to a coworker's laptop over office Wi-Fi without a shared drive, or getting an install file onto a machine you'd rather not sign into a cloud account on.
What I'm working on now
My latest project is Kill Energy Bill. In Flanders, part of the electricity bill is set by a household's highest 15-minute peak of the month. Kill Energy Bill is a smart adapter that watches that peak continuously and steps in automatically before the measurement ends. It comes from the same place as LocalShare: a problem I ran into myself, and a tool that simply solves it.
Support LocalShare
LocalShare is free and will stay free. There is no paid tier and no account, and your files never pass through anything I have to pay storage for. What does cost money is the domain and the small server that introduces your devices to each other, and what costs time is keeping it working as browsers and networks change. If LocalShare saved you a cable, an upload or an afternoon, you can buy me a coffee on Ko-fi or become a sponsor on GitHub. It is entirely optional, and appreciated.
Contact
Questions, bug reports and ideas are welcome through the feedback form. Every message is read. If you are stuck, the FAQ and the guides cover the most common situations.
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