Transfer PDF Files Between Phone and Computer

Move a PDF between your phone and your computer

PDFs travel badly. They are the format everything official arrives in — a contract, an invoice, a boarding pass, a form that has to be signed and sent back — and they are usually on the wrong device at the wrong moment. This page moves one in a browser: open it on the computer, scan the code with the phone, choose the file. No cable, no app, no account.

It is most useful in the direction the phone has become a scanner for. A document photographed or scanned with a phone is already a PDF by the time it is saved; getting it onto a computer normally means emailing it to yourself, which is a round trip through an inbox and a size limit. This is one scan and a few seconds, and the file arrives intact rather than as an attachment somebody has to find again.

Check it before you save it

Every PDF that lands on the computer shows its page count, and the eye button opens it page by page in a window on the page itself — rendered in the browser, not handed to a plug-in or a download. That matters most for scans: it is where you find out that page four came out sideways or that the last page did not make it, before the file goes anywhere.

From your phone to your computer

Leave the selector on Phone to Computer and point the phone’s camera at the code; the built-in camera on iOS and Android both recognise one. The phone opens a page with one button, you pick the PDFs — from the Files app, from a scan you have just made, from wherever they live — and they appear on the computer as they finish, up to 25 of them in one go.

From your computer to your phone

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

The whole toolkit, waiting on the other side

A PDF that arrives here is already inside Pixpoo, so every tool takes it without a second upload. On the row itself:

• Compress PDF — the one most scans need, because a phone scan of ten pages can run to tens of megabytes.
• Edit PDF, Split PDF and Page Numbers.
• Behind More: Rotate, Reorder Pages, Delete Pages, Extract Pages, Add Password, Remove Password, Watermark, Sign PDF, OCR, PDF to Word, PDF to JPG and PDF to PNG.
• Tick several and Merge combines them into one, or Download ZIP saves the lot together.

Limits, and what happens in between

Up to 25 files in one transfer and 150 MB across a session, by default — far above the 25 MB most mail servers stop at, which is the limit this exists to get round. The file is not passed from one device to the other: it is carried by a temporary session on Pixpoo, reachable only through the code inside the QR, claimable once by one phone, and expiring by itself after ten minutes by default. It is deleted when the session ends or when you clear the list. A PDF that is already encrypted crosses intact and still asks for its password when it is opened.

Moving something else? Transfer photos and images or Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, or start from the Bridge and choose there.

Frequently asked questions