My wife recorded several hours of audio during the Bologna Book Fair this week. We’d agreed that she’d send me the audio each evening and I’d run it through local transcription to give her an editable text version of the conversations.
When she tried to send me the files, she was presented with the following error.
too-large.png
附件太长
你要从此附件中选择一个较短的剪辑来 发送吗？
Attachment too long
Would you like to select a shorter clip from this attachment to send?
We needed a way to send a series of large files. They were too large for email and iMessage. Saving to iCloud Drive failed due to poor network connectivity. I don’t like the idea of suggesting third party file transfer service.
I considered:
- Taildrop - Lets you send files between devices owned by a single user. Unfortunately we needed intra-user transfer.
- PairDrop - Think of this like Airdrop for any device. I love this service and self-host an instance. But using it required both of us to be online at the same time.
Many of the self-hosted offerings felt unnecessarily complicated for my use-case. I didn’t need accounts, file management, or client management features. I was toying with writing my own when I discovered PicoShare.
- github.com/mtlynch/picoshare - A minimalist, easy-to-host service for sharing images and other files
I had it up and running in minutes. I generated a link that was valid for the duration of the Book Fair and sent it to my wife. She was then able to upload the files as she recorded them. It worked perfectly.
I love how simple it is so I’m loathe to highlight a couple of things I wish it did. These are both minor and I’m happy to live without them.
- multi-user - Authentication is via a single password (no username). I’d love to be able to give my wife an account. A simple workaround is to host a second instance for her on her domain.
- notification - The only way to know that a file has been uploaded is to log in and check. There are no notifications. We solved this by sending a quick message out of band once files had been uploaded.
PicoShare is an absolute delight to use. If I have have cause to request large files from you, it’s likely you’ll be receiving a PicoShare link.
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