Cannot download from iPhone, its location is not accepted

[Torben Gundtofte-Bruun]

Is there a special trick, or specific setting/configuration that is required regarding the iPhone? I know that Apple is known for their closed products, so I am not immediately suspecting that Rapid itself has a problem.

When I connect my iPhone, I can see in Nautilus that it's listed as:
afc://ca60751cc4b1ebb427c2f9da324914b0643a21f8
so the photos which I want to download are located in
afc://ca60751cc4b1ebb427c2f9da324914b0643a21f8/DCIM
However, Rapid Photo Downloader does not accept this weird location, so I cannot download the photos/videos.

When I start Rapid, then I do see the iPhone listed, but oddly it's listed as four rows, of which every other looks identical, so there there two identical "pairs". But all four rows say "0 photos and videos" even though I can see hundreds via Nautilus.

In Preferences, under "Devices", both checkboxes to autodetect devices are turned on.

[Torben Gundtofte-Bruun (torbengb)]

Clarification on "Rapid does not accept this weird location":

If I turn off the autodetect checkboxes in Preferences>Devices, then I can choose a location. But if I paste the mentioned "afc://..." location from Nautilus into the dialog box, then I cannot submit the dialog box. I have to choose a "real" location.

[Torben Gundtofte-Bruun (torbengb)]

It's also worth mentioning that when I connect the iPhone via USB, then it does appear on the desktop, and Shotwell can download photos from it just fine. But I don't want to use Shotwell of course, Rapid would be so much better :-)

[Torben Gundtofte-Bruun (torbengb)]

Update: I've now had the chance to test with another iPhone (that one's a 3G), which behaves exactly the same as my iPhone 4. This makes me rule out that the problem is with *my* iPhone, but of course it might still be a problem "iPhones in general".
But it works fine in e.g. Shotwell...

[Damon Lynch (dlynch3)]

Hi, thanks for your bug reports and your efforts to make Rapid Photo Downloader work better with your hardware. Rapid Photo Downloader does not directly access cameras & phones. It calls libraries of code written by Gnome and gphoto2 developers. In the last few releases of Gnome, these libraries don't work as well as they once did. It might be that the Gnome developers have devised new functions for accessing devices like iPhones, which can only be called by programs using cutting edge Gnome technologies. Rapid Photo Downloader does not currently use those cutting edge techniques. In fact it will probably require a major effort to use those technologies, affecting many parts of the code base.

Having said all that, it's interesting that Shotwell works so well. I think they've written their own wrapper around gphoto2, but I've not investigated it. When I last checked, there was no comparable wrapper for gphoto2 written in python. It would be worthwhile to investigate this. If someone could do this, that would be very helpful.

[Lars-Eivind Bjørtvedt (larseivind-bjoertvedt)]

I found a way to import photos from my iPhone 4 in Ubuntu! It's a workaround, so I am well aware that this does not solve the problem, but still - it lets you import your photos.

1. Install ifuse (a tool to mount Apple devices)
2. Create a folder where you want to mount your device. I chose to create a folder called "iPhone" directly in my home folder.
3. Run the command "ifuse <mountpoint>". For me, it was "ifuse /home/lars/iPhone". This mounts the iPhone in the specified directory.
4. Run Rapid Photo Downloader, and import your photos. (You will now see 3 "devices" called iPhone, the usual 2 plus one that can actually be imported from.
5. Unmount the iPhone. I have not found a way to do this as a regular user, so I use "sudo umount /home/lars/iPhone".

If you want to mount your iPhone under /media, you have to run the ifuse-command with sudo. You may also have to run Rapid Photo Downloader with sudo, as regular users do not have the right permissions.