Support for importing photos from your mobile phone with the window editor
There can be a few different things that might go wrong when trying to upload photos from a mobile
to the Windows editor. First, we will explain how it is supposed to work, and then we will highlight
some things that can go wrong.
How is it supposed to work
When you start a connection to your mobile phone in the Windows editor, the Windows editor will
start a webserver on the computer on which it is installed. The Windows editor does so by listening on
a port of a local IP address.
The default port number is 8080. The local IP address is requested from the networking environment.
Most (wifi) routers will give your computer an IP address in a range between 192.168.0.0 to
192.168.255.255 or between 172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255 or between 10.0.0.0 to 10.255.255.255.
This local IP address can not be reached from the internet but only from a mobile phone (or another
computer) connected to the same (wifi) router or, more specifically, to the same wifi ssid (name of the
wifi).
What can possibly go wrong
1. The mobile phone is not connected to the same network (the wifi ssid) as the computer
with the Windows Editor listening.
Solve this issue by:
a. Make sure your phone is connected to wifi. When using mobile data, you will never be
able to reach a local IP address.
b. Ensure your phone is connected to the same wifi ssid as the computer with the
Windows Editor listening. When you connect your phone to the wifi, you will see a list
of all the wifi ssids available to your phone. Make sure you pick the wifi ssid that the
computer with the Windows editor listening is also using.
2. The firewall on the computer with the Windows editor listening is blocking the
listening.
The very first time you started the mobile phone transfer web server on the Windows Editor,
you would have gotten a popup question from your firewall software asking if process apc.exe
(which is the Windows Editor) is allowed to listen on some port. If you would have clicked
"No" on this popup, the firewall will block all incoming traffic, and the webserver will not
function.
The best thing to do here is to try to edit your firewall settings. You should open your firewall
user interface and look for rules for inbound traffic for the apc.exe process. There you will
probably see that the rule says to block incoming traffic for the apc.exe. You can now either
delete this rule (then the firewall dialog will pop up when you start the connection once again), or you can edit the existing rule to allow the incoming traffic, and edit both rules for
TCP and for UDP.
Most people will be using the windows defender firewall. You can start the user interface by
typing “Firewall” in the Windows bar search section, windows will suggest opening “Windows
Defender Firewall” which is indeed what you want.
3. Some other firewalls might be blocking the inbound traffic.
It is possible to have multiple firewalls active on a computer. Most antivirus software will come
with its own firewall. So if you allowed the apc.exe inbound traffic in your main firewall (which
is likely the Windows Defender Firewall), please make sure any other firewall on your system is
disabled.