PicoShare is a minimalist, self-hosted web app for sharing files from your own server: you upload a file, get a direct link, and anyone holding that link can view or download it with no ads and no sign-up. It is written in Go and maintained by Michael Lynch as a deliberately small hobby project, with the scope kept to the features its author actually uses.

What it does

• Direct download links — recipients open or download the file straight away, without an account, a paywall or a prompt.
• No restrictions and no re-encoding — any file type or size is accepted, and images, audio and video are served exactly as uploaded, with the original filename and metadata preserved.
• Per-file expiry — each upload can expire after a day, a week, 30 days, a year, on a custom date, or never.
• Guest links — time-limited upload URLs you can hand out without giving anyone admin access, with their own maximum file size and label.
• Optional Litestream replication — point it at an S3-compatible bucket and the SQLite database is continuously replicated, so the container can be destroyed and restored from the cloud copy.

Running it

PicoShare ships as a single container image and keeps everything in one SQLite database under /data, so a volume mount and a shared passphrase are the whole configuration:

docker run -d --name picoshare -p 4001:4001 
  -e PORT=4001 -e PS_SHARED_SECRET=yourpassphrase 
  -v "${PWD}/data:/data" mtlynch/picoshare

It also builds and runs from source with go run cmd/picoshare/main.go, and there is a documented route onto fly.io. Deleted files do not hand their disk space back immediately — the space is reserved for later uploads until you stop the service and run sqlite3 data/store.db 'VACUUM'. A native iOS client, picaroa, is maintained by a third party rather than by the project.

Alternatives

• Filestash — web front end for storage you already have, including SFTP, S3 and WebDAV.
• Filegator — multi-user file manager with roles and per-folder permissions.
• DumbDrop — drop-box style uploads with links that expire.