Transfer Images Between Phone and Computer

Move photos between your phone and your computer

A picture is on the wrong device more often than anything else. It was taken on a phone and it is needed in a document on a laptop, or it has been edited on a desktop and it has to go out from the phone. This page does that move in a browser: open it on the computer, scan the code with the phone’s camera, choose the photographs, and they cross. No cable, no app on either device, and no account on either side.

What makes it worth doing this way rather than the obvious ways is what comes out the other end. A photograph sent through a chat app is re-encoded on the way — smaller, softer, and usually stripped of everything the camera recorded about it. This sends the file, not a rendering of it: the bytes that arrive are the bytes that left, EXIF and all.

What you can send

JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, SVG, AVIF, HEIF/HEIC, BMP and TIFF. Each file is identified by decoding it rather than by trusting its name, so a picture saved with the wrong extension still goes through, and something that is not an image at all is refused before it travels. One thing to know about iPhone photographs: what gets stored is named after what the bytes turn out to be, so a HEIC arrives with a .heif extension. It is the same picture, and Convert Image will turn it into a JPG or PNG if anything further along cannot read it.

From your phone to your computer

This is the direction most people come for. Leave the selector on Phone to Computer, point the phone’s camera at the code — the built-in camera on iOS and Android both recognise one, so there is no scanner app to find — and tap the notification. The phone opens a page with a single button; pick as many photographs as you want in one go. They upload one after another and appear on the computer as they finish, each with its file size and its pixel dimensions, so you can tell the 12-megapixel original from the screenshot at a glance.

From your computer to your phone

Switch the direction and the order reverses. Choose the pictures on the computer first — from the disk, from Google Drive or Dropbox, from a link, or straight off the clipboard, which is the quickest way to move something you have just copied out of another window — then scan the code that is generated for them. The phone receives the images and saves them where downloads normally go.

What you can do with them once they arrive

The reason for landing on Pixpoo rather than in a downloads folder is that the tools are already there. Every picture in the list has them beside it, and choosing one opens the editor with the file loaded — no download, no second upload:

• Resize and Crop — for a photograph that has to fit a slide, a listing or an upload box with a pixel limit on it.
• Compress — a phone photograph is often 4–8 MB, which is more than most forms will take.
• Convert — HEIF to JPG, PNG to WebP, and the rest of the combinations.
• Watermark, Remove Background and Upscale for the rest.
• Or take the whole arrival at once: Create PDF turns a set of photographs into one document, and Download ZIP saves them together.

Limits, and what happens in between

Up to 25 photographs in one transfer and 150 MB across a session, by default. The pictures are not passed from one device to the other; 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 it expires by itself — ten minutes by default. The files are deleted when the session ends or when you clear the list.

Moving something that is not a photograph? Transfer a PDF or a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file instead, or start from the Bridge and choose there.

Frequently asked questions