Total Commander

I'm on a Pixel4 phone (Android v13) with Total Commander v3.50. The phone is paired and connected with a Windows 10 x64 PC about 2 ft away.

I navigate to a 2MB JPG in the phone internal storage DCIM 'Camera" folder. I long press on the JPG and in the menu choose "Copy / Move / Send via Bluetooth". Which (I later learned) means "Copy or Move including Bluetooth & Wi-Fi".

So I select "Send via Bluetooth" which brings up the paired & connected PC destination; and I select that.

That pops a progress / info window which says ""Connection failed! read failed, socket might closed or timeout, read ret: -1"

If I keep trying I sometimes get "Bluetooth error! Connection failed! Attempt to invoke virtual method 'void.android.bluetooth.BluetoothSocket.connect()' on a null object reference"

I realize this may be a Bluetooth hardware problem, and nothing to do with TC per se, but maybe the error messages can help diagnose or narrow down the problem. In the Pixel "Apps Files Access" TC has access to all files. Bluetooth headphones connected to this PC work fine.

I incidentally suggest that the Copy / Move function be better named, maybe "Transfer incl Bluetooth & Wi-Fi".

Thanks for any help.

Windows does not listen for Bluetooth transmissions all the time. You need to right click on the Bluetooth icon in the system tray and choose "Receive file" to wait for incoming files. When you send multiple files together, they will all be received together too.

Telling Windows to "receive" files works, thanks.

I haven't before used Bluetooth for file transfer and had no idea of the need to do that. Since it works fine for headphones, I assumed it would work automatically or at least reasonably on other things as well. Getting those arcane, complete failure, uninterpretable error messages in Total Commander was unexpected and baffling.

I suggest that in the TC panel where the Bluetooth destination is to be chosen, add the advice on telling Windows to receive the file.

"My" cases always seem to be unique, somehow, but it appears that this would be a FAQ.

Thanks for your attention.

Bluetooth is unfortunately very slow for today's photos or even videos, so I don't recommend using it if you can use any other method. For example, you could instead use the LAN plugin to access a shared folder on the PC, and copy the files there.