Transfer Files Between Phone and Computer

What is Pixpoo Bridge?

Pixpoo Bridge moves files between a phone and a computer through a web page. You choose what you are sending, scan a QR code with the phone’s camera, and the files cross — photographs from a holiday, a signed PDF, a spreadsheet a colleague needs. There is no cable to find, no app to install on either device and no account to create, and it works in both directions: phone to computer when the picture is on the phone, and computer to phone when the file is on the desk.

It exists because the everyday ways of doing this are all slightly wrong. A cable needs the right cable and, on iPhone, the right software. Emailing a file to yourself turns a 30-second job into an inbox round trip and bounces above 25 MB. Chat apps re-compress photographs into something smaller than what you took. AirDrop is excellent and only between Apple devices; Quick Share has the same shape of limit on the other side. A browser is the one thing both devices already have.

What you can transfer

Three categories, each with its own page so that the picker, the preview and the tools waiting on the far side match what you are moving:

• Images — JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, SVG and more. Sent at full size, not squeezed the way a messaging app squeezes them, and every one that arrives can go straight into Resize, Crop, Compress, Convert or Watermark.
• PDF — a scan from a phone camera, a contract, a form. A PDF that lands on the computer can be previewed page by page and handed to Compress, Merge, Split, Sign or Add Password without a second upload.
• Documents — DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, TXT, CSV and RTF, for the files that are not pictures and not PDFs, with Word to PDF a click away when one needs to go out as a PDF.

Sending from your phone to your computer

Open the category on the computer and a QR code appears. Point the phone’s camera at it — no scanner app; the built-in camera on iOS and Android both recognise a code — and tap the notification. The phone opens a page with one button on it, you choose the photographs or files, and they arrive on the computer as they finish, each with its size, its dimensions or page count, and the tools that can act on it. This is the direction most people arrive for: a picture taken on a phone that has to end up in a document on a laptop.

Sending from your computer to your phone

Switch the direction and the order reverses: choose the files on the computer first — from the disk, from Google Drive or Dropbox, from a link or straight off the clipboard — then scan the code that is generated for them. The phone receives the files and saves them where downloads normally go. It is the quickest way to get a finished export, a ticket or a boarding pass from a desk onto the device that will actually be carrying it.

What happens to a file while it is in flight

Plainly, because it matters: the files are not passed device to device. They are carried by a temporary session on Pixpoo, which is how a phone on mobile data can send to a computer on a wired network at the other end of a building. That session is reachable only through the code inside the QR, the code can be claimed once by one phone, and the session expires by itself — ten minutes by default. Files are deleted when the session ends or when you clear the list, and nothing is kept, indexed or used for anything afterwards. There is no account, so there is nothing for a file to be attached to.

Limits worth knowing before you start

• Up to 25 files in one transfer, and 150 MB in a session, by default.
• Both devices need a browser and an internet connection; they do not need to be on the same Wi-Fi.
• Keep the computer’s page open until the transfer finishes — the list of received files lives on that page, and closing it ends the session.
• A phone’s HEIC photographs cross with their bytes untouched, though what gets stored is named after what the bytes turn out to be — so a HEIC lands with a .heif extension. If something further down the line cannot read it, Convert Image turns it into a JPG or a PNG.

Frequently asked questions