# Get screenshots and files from your coding agent on your phone > Open the screenshots, PDFs and videos Codex or Claude Code makes, and send phone screenshots back. Free options compared, plus how BotBus does it. Canonical: https://botbus.io/en/blog/view-agent-screenshots-and-files-on-phone Published: 2026-10-29 ## The short answer When you are away from your desk, most of what a coding agent produces is a file: a screenshot of the page it just changed, an exported PDF, a screen recording, a zip. In the terminal you get "saved to `docs/report.pdf`", which is useless on a phone. The other direction is just as awkward: you screenshot a broken screen on your phone and there is no easy way to drop it into the agent's session on your computer. [BotBus](https://botbus.io/en/) connects both directions. In tasks you start or continue from your phone, the agent can push files and screenshots back to that task with `botbus share`. Image, video and PDF paths the agent mentions in a reply turn into cards you can tap to pull the file from your computer. And when you message Codex or Claude Code from your phone, you can attach photos from your camera roll. Below: the free ways people already do this, where they get clumsy, and exactly what BotBus does and does not do. ## What you can do without installing anything new There are perfectly good free options, and plenty of people are happy with them. **SSH plus scp or sftp.** Put an SSH client on your phone, reach your machine over Tailscale or a forwarded port, and pull files down or push images up, then tell the agent the path. Great if you live in SSH already. The friction is the number of steps: find the directory, transfer the file, then type "look at `/tmp/shot.png`" into the terminal, one-handed, on a train. **A synced folder.** Ask the agent to save outputs into iCloud Drive or Dropbox and wait for the phone app to sync. Good when you want to keep the files anyway. You have to agree on a folder up front, sync lags, throwaway screenshots pile up, and the files live in a third-party cloud under that provider's terms. **A chat bot.** Wire a hook or script that posts files to Telegram or Slack when the agent finishes. Ideal if you already run a bot and only want "send me a picture when you're done." It is one-way, though. Once you see the image and want to say "move that button a little to the right," you are back in a different app, and the files pass through the chat platform's servers. The common problem: the file and the conversation live in different places. You look at the image in one app, reply in another, and the agent has no idea which image you are looking at. ## Three ways files reach your phone ### 1. The agent shares them When a task is started or continued from your phone, BotBus tells the agent that you are away and cannot see the screen, and gives it a small toolset for sending things back: the `botbus share ` command and the equivalent MCP tools `share_file` and `share_link`. Claude Code, Codex and agents connected over ACP (OpenCode, for example) all get these tools in phone-started sessions. You just say "take a screenshot and send it to me" or "send me the PDF you generated," and the agent picks the file. Shared items land in the task's **Artifacts** sheet, opened from the button above the input box (it shows a count): - **Images**: PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP and HEIC display inline and can be zoomed. They also open on Apple Watch. - **Videos** play on the phone with a poster frame and duration. On a Mac, videos over 10 MiB are re-encoded to a 720p, 540p or 480p mp4 automatically. The Linux and Windows versions do not transcode, so trim or compress longer clips first. - **Other files** (PDF, text, zip, PSD and so on) are accepted as files. iPhone previews them with Quick Look; Android shows text and PDFs in the app and hands the rest to the system. Anything that won't preview can still be saved. - **Links** must be http or https and cannot point at your own machine. For a local dev server use a preview instead, covered in [view your localhost dev server on your phone](https://botbus.io/en/blog/preview-localhost-dev-server-on-iphone). Each task keeps up to 10 artifacts, newest first, and each file can be up to 10 MiB. ![The artifacts sheet for a task in BotBus on a phone](https://botbus.io/shots/en/phone-artifacts.webp) ### 2. Tap a file the agent mentioned Often the agent never shares anything and just writes "the screenshot is at `screenshots/home.png`." BotBus spots image, video and PDF paths in the reply text and draws them as file cards. Tap one and your phone asks the computer for it. The computer checks that the exact path really appears in that reply and sits inside the task's working directory, then encrypts and uploads the file, and the phone opens it as soon as it arrives. This does not need the agent's cooperation, so it also works in sessions you started at your desk. It only covers images, videos and PDFs in the latest 40 messages, and it is switched off when the project directory is too broad, such as a session opened directly in your home folder. ### 3. "Send me attachments" When the Artifacts sheet is empty it offers a "send me attachments" shortcut. Tapping it sends a follow-up asking the agent to share the relevant files from this turn. The agent decides what to send, so each tap costs a turn. ## Sending your phone screenshots to the agent Now the reverse: you grabbed a screenshot of a broken page or snapped a whiteboard and want the agent to work from it. When you continue a Codex or Claude Code task from your phone, or start a new chat with either one, there is an image button in the bottom-left of the input box. You can attach up to 4 images per message. - On iPhone it uses the system photo picker, so BotBus never asks for photo library access. Android also uses the system photo picker. - Before sending, images are scaled to 1920 pixels on the long edge and re-encoded as JPEG. The original EXIF data, including location, is not sent. - Other agents (Hermes, Pi, OpenClaw, DeepSeek Harness and others) do not accept images from the phone yet, and the button does not appear for them. If you just want to dig through a folder without going through the agent, use **Operate computer** on the chat screen. Its Files tab lets you browse directories on your computer, open and edit files, and upload from your phone. Uploads and edits require unlocking from the phone first, and it relocks after 10 idle minutes. ## Requirements and limits - **Your computer has to be on and online**, running BotBus, with the agent installed on the same machine. If it goes offline, artifacts already uploaded stay viewable, but file cards you have not fetched yet won't open. - **Agent-side sharing only exists in phone-started or phone-continued tasks.** Sessions you start at your desk don't get the tools; you rely on file cards there. - **Size and retention**: 10 MiB per file. Bytes stay on the relay for 7 days by default; after that the computer must be online to fetch them again. On a Mac, a very long video can take longer to transcode than the local tool's roughly 150-second wait and fail. - **Tool screenshots are not shown**: when Claude Code reads an image or drives a browser or simulator, the transcript only keeps a one-line text summary. Ask the agent to `botbus share` the image if you want to see it. - **Security scope**: screenshots, files and conversation content are encrypted on your computer with a key created at pairing before upload, and the relay stores ciphertext. The server can still see device IDs, online status, update times and data sizes. Dev previews are not end-to-end encrypted. Details are in the [security notes](https://botbus.io/en/docs/security). ## FAQ ### Can a Claude Code session I started on my Mac send screenshots to my phone? Not on its own: `botbus share` is only injected into tasks started or continued from the phone. But any image, video or PDF path it writes in a reply shows up as a tappable file card. Continue the session from your phone and the sharing tools are there from that turn on. ### How many images can I send the agent from my phone? Up to 4 per message, and only Codex and Claude Code accept them. They are resized to 1920 pixels on the long edge, converted to JPEG, and stripped of EXIF and location data. ### What file types work? Almost anything can be shared. PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP and HEIC display as images, videos play, and everything else is treated as a file: Quick Look on iPhone, in-app PDF and text viewing on Android, the system for the rest. File cards in replies only cover images, videos and PDFs. ### Does this work with a Linux or Windows computer? Yes. The Linux and Windows versions support `botbus share` and file cards too. They don't transcode video, so clips over 10 MiB can't be sent, and they have no dev previews. Downloads are on the [home page](https://botbus.io/en/#download). ### Can I see them on Apple Watch? Images from artifacts and from the conversation open on the watch. Videos, PDFs and other files show a prompt to open them on your iPhone.