How to Share Files Between PCs, Smartphones and Tablets

When it comes to sharing files these days, it’s no longer just about sharing between computers. Now your friend with an Android phone might want some videos you took from your iPhone or you may want to copy a bunch of pictures from a Windows PC to your iPad.

In this article, I hope to give you as complete a guide to sharing across devices as possible. It’s going to be long, so feel free to skip down to the section that applies to you. The sections will be broken down into sharing between computers, sharing between computers and mobile devices, and sharing between mobile devices only.

When it comes to sharing files between computers, you can break it down into two types: local sharing or remote sharing. If you need to copy some files to another computer on your local network, it will be much faster because you’ll either be using Ethernet or Wi-Fi to perform the transfer.

This is the best way to transfer a large amount of data to another computer quickly. When copying files outside of your LAN (local area network), you are limited by your Internet speed. If you have Verizon FIOS with a 75 Mbps upload/download connection (which I have now), then transferring large amounts of data to a remote computer will also be fast.

However, if you’re stuck with AT&T and have a miserable 1.5 Mbps upload speed (which I had in the past), it’ll take a long time to upload a few gigabytes of data. Let’s first talk about local data transfers.