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📷➡️🖥️ Get photos from your phone into Xferase’s inbox

Conceptual Overview

The best way to sync files between your phone and your computer is with a file sync utility called Syncthing (Desktop | Android).

By the end of this guide, you’ll have two new subdirectories in your Xferase inbox: one synced to your Android’s DCIM folder (for photos you take) and the other to its Pictures folder (for photos you save from chat apps).

Before we get started, here are some questions you might be asking yourself right now:

🤔 Where do I find Xferase’s inbox?

It’s wherever you want it to be; Xferase has no default inbox path, and can watch any directory you tell it to. (I personally prefer ~/Pictures/.inbox).

🤔 What about iPhone?

I don’t believe this setup is possible with an iPhone:

  • Our goal is to set up two-way file sync (not only do photos taken on your phone appear on your computer, but photos deleted from your computer are removed from your phone, as well).

  • In the iOS security model, applications are sandboxed and given limited access to the filesystem. File sync apps like Dropbox can read from your camera roll, but they can’t delete from it.

🤔 What about Dropbox?

Syncthing is like Dropbox on steroids (and it’s FOSS, to boot). Dropbox only syncs a single master directory (at /home/user/Dropbox), whereas Syncthing lets you do things like:

  • specify which directory you want to sync
  • sync multiple directories
  • sync different sets of directories to different devices
  • define filename patterns to ignore when syncing (like in a .gitignore)

Syncthing on desktop (left) and mobile (right), with three folders shared between them.

Step 1: Install Syncthing & Add Devices

Follow Syncthing’s official Getting Started guide to get it installed and link your devices to each other.

When you’re done, you should see your computer in your phone’s Syncthing device list (and vice versa):

Step 2: Add & Accept Folders

Open Syncthing on your phone and create a folder for your DCIM directory. Make sure to share it with your computer (in this case, madras):

Then, access Syncthing’s web UI on your computer (default https://localhost:8384) and accept the newly shared directory. Configure it to sync to a subdirectory of your Xferase inbox:

Repeat this process for any other directories on your phone that you’d like to auto-import from (e.g., /Pictures/Telegram, /Pictures/Instagram, etc.).

⚠️ Warning: Don’t sync the whole /Pictures directory

Otherwise, you may end up with a recursively-syncing, circular-dependency scenario in the final step.

(There are ways to get around this using ignore patterns in Syncthing, but that’s beyond the scope of this guide.)

That’s all there is to it! 🥂