CimBar
Send a file through the air.
Phone to phone, screen to camera. No network, no cable, no pairing.
How it works
Send
Add a passphrase (optional)
Advanced
Ready to send
Receive
One photo per frame — keep going until every frame is in.
Details
Receive
This file is protected
All frames are in. Enter the passphrase to open it — no need to scan again.
Received
How it works
Your file becomes an animated code, optionally locked with a passphrase.
Show it full screen, or share the GIF.
The other phone reads the frames in any order; any N of them rebuild the file.
Under the hood
CimBar (Color Icon Matrix Barcode) encodes binary data into a grid of colored geometric symbols. This tool uses a simplified variant: each cell encodes 6 bits — 2 bits select one of 4 colors, 4 bits select one of 16 tile shapes. Before encoding, your file can optionally be encrypted with AES-256-GCM, and each frame's data is protected by Reed-Solomon error correction (64 ECC bytes per 255-byte block, RS(255, 191), up to 32 byte errors per block). Files are zlib-compressed first when that saves space, and every GIF — like present mode — carries extra repair frames, so any N frames out of the stream rebuild the file. Type a message in Send's Text mode and the receiver sees it as text, ready to copy or save.
One 608×608 px frame is a 64×64 grid of 8 px tiles (1 px gaps) with four 7×7-cell finders. 3 840 usable cells × 6 bits = 2 880 raw bytes. After RS(255,191): 2 112 protected bytes; minus an 8-byte frame header = 2 104 file bytes per frame. A 50 KB file needs ≈ 25 frames.
GIF palette: The GIF palette holds the four v2 colors plus black and white exactly, so encoding is lossless; Reed-Solomon is there for damage and camera errors, not quantization.