Comment 31 for bug 351122

"1) My camera takes a very long time to mount for some reason."

this is actually a bit of a puzzle and may in fact be a bug. you will get a busy cursor for a signficant period of time, but I've found that applications can usually see the mounted volume long before the busy cursor disappears.

"Is it the fact that the usb connection is slow or something else. The contrast with a usb stick is striking."

Every PTP device I've owned has been slow. There are tricks to speed up browsing access: when reading from the PTP device, the importer should not try to read image metadata and use the gphoto-gvfs supplied methods to read internal thumbs (which uses the relevant gphoto calls). The importer should only read the metadata after copying files off the device.

My (still buggy) application phraymd will give you a sense of the potential performance of gvfs-gphoto:
1. install from the ppa here: https://launchpad.net/~damien-moore/+archive/ppa
2. start phraymd from the applications menu. you will be prompted to choose an image collection directory. just choose a folder with a few photos in it to avoid a lengthy indexing process. hereafter this becomes your collection. you can move images in here and they will be show up in phraymd.
3. now plug in your PTP camera. phraymd should detect it and the sidebar should open an import page (note that you may still see the busy cursor for a bit even though the device is properly mounted).
4. The "Import from" combo box should allow you to choose you camera.
5. Use the default options (Load metadata unchecked, Use internal thumbnails checked) and choose browse now.
6. The browser view will now populate with images on the camera. The sidebar will show import options
7. You can select some images by clicking in the browser and "import" them otherwise just cancel to return to your collection view. The importer is still a bit buggy -- your mileage may vary as to how well this works (I'm in the process of refactoring this code)

"2) Isn't it rather strange that so many apps are having problems with a ptp mount? Are these
cameras so rare that the upstream devs are just ignoring this problem or are these projects
not very active?"

I don't know. I've definitely seen bugs that were simply packaging SNAFUs that broke support for some cameras

I think that part of the problem is that media handling is still a bit of a moving target. The import script that worked fine in one version of Ubuntu (or other gnome distros for that matter) might not work well in the next due to changes in gvfs/gphoto/nautilus/some other dependency.