But every now and then, I do use it as a camera, and there's something I really want from it. I'll dig out the white Apple proprietary USB cable and plug in. Usually I get the 'searching for driver' bit, then a fail. At work, I'd written it off as a big-brother firewall problem at first (blocked driver download). Then I discovered that my cube neighbor's iPhone worked on my machine, and my phone also failed on his machine . . . so much for a driver issue. I figured maybe a phone issue. Anyway, I can't be bothered with troubleshooting USB devices to get one photo, so I'd email it to myself. At home I'd just roll my eyes and fire up iTunes . . . after a few restarts of the Apple Mobile Device Service and a couple unplugs and replugs, maybe a reboot of the phone, it would be recognized as a device, and I could get the pictures out with Picasa.
But now I've got a new laptop. I really don't want to put iTunes on it until I'm ready to retire my old laptop, because I don't want to mess around with having to deauthorize all my former computers in order to authorize my new one (don't get me started on that, that's a whole other topic).
So when I plug the phone into my new laptop and it comes up as 'random usb thing which by the way failed to start' - it's on!
Google's taken all the fun out of low level troubleshooting, but there's no sense spending hours and hours on something that's common knowledge, so I did some searches. I turned up the usual crap from Apple and Apple cultist forums about updating to the latest firmware, rebooting your iPhone, rebooting your PC, updating to latest iTunes, reinstalling iTunes, blah blah blah.
Then I spotted something on a Microsoft site: 'Windows 7 will not recognize my iPhone as a Camera' [1] . That's promising, my exact symptoms, and a Microsoft forum, so it should (one would think) be free of Apple bullshit. So taking a look at it, the first response (which by the way is marked as 'the answer') links to some Apple KB article talking about USB drivers being 'out of date'. What an absolute load of crap, what kind of flakey garbage hanging on the end of the cable is going to have a problem with fresh out of the box Win7 USB drivers, or any drivers for that matter. You're doing something wrong if your hardware is worried about USB driver minor versions on various operating systems.
Just out of curiosity regarding peoples luck with this 'solution' I scrolled down the page . . . where I spotted this:
"There is something wrong with the firmware in the iphone. If you have any photos that are in your photo album within the phone that are there from any source except the phone itself such as an emailed photo or downloaded photo, PC's and Macs will not recognize your phone. You must delete the "foreign pictures" then the Mac or PC will recognize the phone."
Now that sounded more like the Apple crapware I know. I've always had 'foreign pictures' in my Camera Roll. And I know that was not always a problem, as I've used that space to move images from photo collection to photo collection at times. But annoying as it was, it had the sound of the sort of bug Apple would roll out, so I thought I'd give it a try. I did a quick run through and deleted every image that wasn't taken by the iPhone. Lo and behold, plug it in, it pops up as a camera . . . hmm. Figuring I'd repro it, do my bit, and properly report a firmware bug to Apple Dev. . . I pulled down a couple large images from my Flickr, and some PNG files off XKCD, but was unable to reproduce the problem again . . . go figure. *sigh*
How do people that make such terrible software, get their hands on such awesome hardware to defile with their garbage?
Anyway, if your iPhone's not recognized as a camera, try cleaning out your Camera Roll.
Anyway, if your iPhone's not recognized as a camera, try cleaning out your Camera Roll.
I'm gonna go kick a mac.
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