About SnapDrop

SnapDrop moves files straight from one device to another using your web browser. There is nothing to install, no account to create, and no upload step — you open the same page on two devices and they find each other.

It exists because sending a photo from a phone to a laptop is still unreasonably annoying if the two devices do not share an ecosystem. AirDrop solves this beautifully, for Apple hardware only. SnapDrop solves the same problem for whatever you happen to have.

Who runs this instance

snap-drop.net is operated by lilac, an independent developer. It is a personal project, not a company, and it is free to use.

You can reach the operator at [email protected] for anything about the service, including privacy questions and requests about your data. For bugs and feature requests, the issue tracker is a better place — it is public and other people benefit from the answer.

Running costs are covered out of pocket, with some help from sponsors and from advertising on this site.

What it is built on

SnapDrop is a fork. It descends from Snapdrop by Robin Linus, which established the idea, and from PairDrop by schlagmichdoch, which added persistent device pairing and transfers between networks. Nearly all of the engineering behind the transfer itself is theirs, and both projects deserve the credit for it.

This fork exists to run a maintained public instance and to make small changes to how that instance is hosted and funded. The source is on GitHub. If you would rather not depend on someone else's server, you can host it yourself — that is a supported and genuinely reasonable thing to do.

If you are self-hosting

The operator name, contact address, and funding details on this page describe snap-drop.net specifically. If you deploy your own instance, replace them with your own or delete these pages entirely — nothing in the application depends on them. The same applies to the privacy policy and the terms of use, which describe how this instance is run and would be inaccurate for yours.

Two things are worth changing rather than deleting. These pages hardcode snap-drop.net in their rel="canonical" tags, and so does the application page — left as-is, that tells search engines your homepage is really ours. They also assume they are served from the site root. Both are a few lines of find-and-replace, and both are easy to miss.