Sending someone a link to a photo is a much worse experience than sending them the actual photo directly to their phone.

Sending a photo over text message often compresses it, which isn't always desirable. (Not actually sure if it gets compressed when sent of iMessage)

I've also used it to send people photos when we were in places without cell service like on hiking and camping trips.

For me, video is the main one. Sizes from 100MB - 3GB. Getting videos from an Apple device to an Android is a pain in the ass because I need to 2FA log in or click through something relatively convoluted (Dropbox, GDrive) or deal with pulling out some hardware I use once every 100 years (external drives). Localsend is a 2 or 3 click operation and very robust.

Sending plain text from one device to another. I was debugging my steamdeck and I send code snippet from desktop chatgpt to steamdeck using Localsend to run. Then I send the debug output (also plaintext) back to desktop to ask chatgpt what to try next. Other than this, random small files from time to time. The app is lightweight and just works.

I use it for moving SSH keys, VPN configs, and .env files between my laptop and a work machine. Obviously don't want that sitting in dropbox, pasted into Slack, etc. Localsend on the same network, gone in two seconds no account and no history. Easier than spinning up scp every time.

I only use it for sending a bunch of photos that wouldn't go so well over iMessage, usually on vacation. And sometimes that vacation involves not having cell service. Otherwise I'll usually message a single photo to someone because AirDrop is finicky.

Silly apple. They should remove airdrop and tell users they have to rely on an internet connection and use whatsapp or email for quick, one-off file transfers between their iphones and macbooks.

I use LocalSend a lot to send my clipboard or random files when I don't feel like using ssh or using NAS as intermediary.

my kid recently wanted to transfer a picture from an iPad drawing app to a windows laptop, I wish I knew about localsend for that