Easy When You Know How
Worried that emailing himself meant he was going mad, Robert Irvine instead tries to...
Robert Irvine transfers phone files over Wi-fi
“Talking to yourself during lockdown?” began an article I read recently. “Yes!” I said to myself. “If you live alone, you’re not alone” continued the piece, “but it’s nothing to worry about”. After breathing a sigh of relief, I wondered if the same reassurance applies to taking photos of yourself, emailing yourself and – for the purposes of a feature I wrote last issue – having a video chat with yourself because you don’t want to bother anyone else?
In the case of self-addressed emails, I’ve found it’s the easiest way to transfer screenshots I capture on my phone or tablet to my PC. However, it still takes too much time, and can even be worrying when I start writing messages like: “Hi Robert, here are those grabs you wanted. Best wishes, Robert”. Surely there’s a quicker and saner method of sharing files between devices?
With that in mind, I was intrigued to discover a tool called Feem ( https://feem. io), which lets you send files from your phone to your PC over your Wi-fi network, and claims to be 50 times faster than Bluetooth. Despite its odd name, which brought to mind Little Britain’s Dennis Waterman sketches (“write the feem tune, sing the feem tune”), I wanted to see if Feem fulfilled my file-sharing needs. Didn’t I, Robert? Yes, you did.
I downloaded Feem’s free Android app ( www.snipca.com/38637) to my phone – it’s also available for IOS: www.snipca. com/38636 – and its desktop program ( www.snipca.com/38644) to my Windows laptop, and ensured both devices were connected to my Wi-fi. On Android, I was prompted to grant Feem storage permission and access to my location, but these seemed like reasonable requests.
I liked the quirky names that Feem gave my devices – my phone was Silver Worm while my laptop was Reliable Tortoise – and because they appeared in both apps, I was confident things were up and running. Sadly, for some reason, the Feem desktop program said that Reliable Tortoise was disconnected from my Wi-fi, even though the Feem mobile app showed it as connected, and told me to “connect this device to the same Wi-fi network”.
This caused me at least an hour’s worth of hassle, as I tried tweaking various Wi-fi settings, restarted my laptop several times and even – shock, horror, please don’t tell the security police! – disabled Windows Defender Firewall. Nothing fixed the problem, the air in my flat had turned blue and I was about to abandon Feem, when I thought I’d try sending a file anyway. And it worked!
I simply tapped Reliable Tortoise on my Android phone, chose Send File and selected an image I wanted to transfer to my PC. Helpfully, Feem organises items into categories such as Photos, Videos, Audio and Files, which saves time when browsing the contents of your mobile device. I tapped Send and Silver Worm instantly transferred the picture to Feem on my laptop, where I was able to open and save it. I then tried sending further files and they copied over pronto, too. My only complaint was that the Feem app displays a full-screen ad for its Pro version every time you send a file. This costs $4.99 (£3.54) and gives you features such as sharing files to multiple devices at once, as well as removing all ads.
When I turned the Windows firewall back on, Feem stopped working again, so I deduced that I needed to allow the program network access. I went into the ‘Firewall & network protection’ section of Windows Security, chose ‘Allow an app through the firewall’, then clicked ‘Change settings’ and granted Feem access to my Private and Public networks (see screenshot left).
This did the trick, and though the program still showed Reliable Tortoise as being ‘disconnected’, this was evidently just a semantic bug. Otherwise, I’m in complete agreement with myself that Feem works like a dream.
Need help with transferring photos and files across your devices?
Let us know: noproblem@computeractive.co.uk
Please don’t tell the security police that I disabled the Windows firewall