Monday, May 20, 2019

Linux, Android phone, pictures sync


How do I move files, pictures, backups from my phone to my desktop? Actually it's very easy, and there's no need to install ADB, root your phone, connect USB cables, pop out SD cards, deal with FuseBlock filesystems or have to follow the arcane steps I see posted on other sites. It all can be done faster and better via Wifi with simple high level apps.

First, start with a Samsung account. Your phone, calendar, apps, etc get backed up to Samsung's cloud, 15GB for free. You can even store photos there and then view/download to your desktop. Lots of other features, like find your phone and view last calls.
Log onto https://findmymobile.samsung.com and/or support.samsungcloud.com.

Google Drive - shares files easily between phone and desktop, even share your photos with family and friends.

Google Keep - great app, I use it everyday. Lets you take notes on either desktop or mobile and they appear automatically on both, great for shopping lists, you can even share notes with other Google Keep users.

KDEConnect - very rich full featured app that integrates phone and desktop, lets you send and respond to SMS, see incoming phone calls on your desktop, use your phone as a desktop mouse, send files, browse files system and more. Another great app that I've used for years. Except for the problem of it not working. I get a few days or weeks out of it and then it unpairs and I have to go through a bunch of pair steps again, currently even though it's paired I can't send pictures to my desktop. Tried of dealing with, stopped using it.

Syncthing - My new favorite thing, rsync made easy. I've configured it to automatically transfer pics I take on my phone to my desktop. It doesn't have all the features of KDEConnect, but really all I care about, or anyone does, is getting pictures off my phone. Just one small problem, it doesn't support SD cards, where most people store their pictures. This makes it a practically useless app. However, there's a (arcane) workaround. All you need to do is manually create a file called ".stfolder" on the SD card in the photos directory. This can be easily done with ES File Explorer, or pop out the SD card and mount it on your desktop. The only problem is finding the right path on the phone, in my case I created this file "/storage/3138-3961/DCIM/Camera/.stfolder" and now all my photos sync from the SD Card to my Linux desktop.
Check out http://127.0.0.1:8384 after you install the Syncthing RPM.

AndFTP - Uses SSH to send files from your phone to your desktop, always works, great fall back if nothing else works.

So between Samsung cloud backups and Syncthing photo transfers, it's very easy now to get things off my Android phone.