Android : Browsing your PC from your Phone
If you are like me and have a lot of music, videos, and pictures stored on an external hard drive that you want to browse from your Android smartphone than you have a couple options. Some are expensive (a WIFI hard drive such as this one). Others require you to trust your data to the cloud which you may or may not be comfortable with. And still others are needlessly complicated (setting up your own FTP server was one suggestion I got).
After some searching I was able to compose a simple and free option, which, while a little primitive, certainly gets the job done.
ES File Explorer is a free app available on the Android market:
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.estrongs.android.pop
Its primary goal is to let you to browse files on your phone. However it allows provides support for several other file sharing methods including share drives over a LAN using the simple sharing service available on Windows computers.
From a Windows computer attached to your local network, simply right click on the drive or folder you want to share, and click "Sharing and Security" to open up the file sharing configuration. (More information here.)
Now you can open ES File Explorer, and in the upper left corner select there is a drop down menu (defaults to "Local") that has a "LAN" option on it. Selecting LAN should display a list of shared folders on your local network.
Now when I first did this it worked for folders on my laptop local drive, but did not work for the USB attached hard drive where I stored my file backups. I could see the share, but when I clicked on it in ES File Explorer
Apparently there is some obscure registry setting that can prevent you from successfully sharing. Detailed instructions are here.
In summary:
After some searching I was able to compose a simple and free option, which, while a little primitive, certainly gets the job done.
ES File Explorer is a free app available on the Android market:
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.estrongs.android.pop
Its primary goal is to let you to browse files on your phone. However it allows provides support for several other file sharing methods including share drives over a LAN using the simple sharing service available on Windows computers.
From a Windows computer attached to your local network, simply right click on the drive or folder you want to share, and click "Sharing and Security" to open up the file sharing configuration. (More information here.)
Now you can open ES File Explorer, and in the upper left corner select there is a drop down menu (defaults to "Local") that has a "LAN" option on it. Selecting LAN should display a list of shared folders on your local network.
Now when I first did this it worked for folders on my laptop local drive, but did not work for the USB attached hard drive where I stored my file backups. I could see the share, but when I clicked on it in ES File Explorer
Apparently there is some obscure registry setting that can prevent you from successfully sharing. Detailed instructions are here.
In summary:
- Open regedit.exe
- Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters
- If the IRPStackSize value is present, double click on it. If it is not present, create it by right clicking in the Parameters window, selecting New, then DWord Value. Type IRPStackSize (it is case sensitive!)
- Change the base to "decimal"
- Choose a value that is larger than the existing value (or if you just created it, higher than the default value of 15.)
- Restart your computer and try it now.
- You may need to increase IRPStackSize a second time if it does not work. The maximum value you can enter is 50.
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Note: If you want to do the reverse of this, that is browse your phone from your PC, try this app.
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.dooblou.WiFiFileExplorer
If you want some additional functionality, you should check out GMote Server and its accompanying app. It does one better for media and lets you browse and play it from your phone.
Drawback is, I don't believe that it lets you browse any files but media files, so if you want to look through things in more detail, it may not be the app for you.
I'm going to check out ES later :)