Copy pictures from Samsung Galaxy S2 to computer?

[k999]

Has anyone managed to copy pictures from their Samsung Galaxy S2 to their Ubuntu 12.04 computer?

First I tried Kies Air, but I have like 500 pictures, and the "download all" just doesn't to work. I select the folder and click OK, then nothing happens, no errors, no files copied. I can download one picture at a time, but I can't be bothered!

So I dug out a USB cable, and connected it. The phone only gets detected as an audio player. I've changed the phone's settings so that it should show up as a camera, but Ubuntu always detects it as an audio player. I wouldn't care if I could just copy the pictures, but it only shows up with lots of folders named 0000000a, 0000000b, 0000000c, etc... and they're all empty. No pictures to be found.

I tried to enable USB debugging, but it doesn't even seem to work on the phone.

Finally I installed gMTP, but it just crashes when I run it as my own user, and running it under SUDO it complains that the USB device vendorid:deviceid are unknown.

Sheesh, this was difficult!

[typos1]

I have the same phone, all I do is plug in the phone's lead (micro usb to phone, standard usb to pc). Then I drag down the menu on the phone (the one where you turn on and off wifi etc) and hit the "usb connected" icon and then "connnect usb storage" then the phone shows as a usb device on the pc.

[k999]

What software version is your phone running? Mine is Android version 4.0.3, what you're describing sounds more like the version I had before.

[typos1]

Right, I havent upgraded to icecreamsandwhich yet.

Cant see why theyd change how it interfaces with the pc though, mind you its evil google we re talking about here so anythings possible. Nothing online about changes in icecreamsandwich ? You tried googling it ?

[jawilljr]

Try these instructions.

Hope it works.

Jerry

[typos1]

OMG!-what a load of hassle. Trust Google, I really cant wait til the Android and Linux kernels merge and ubuntu phone comes out, then I can junk that Google rubbish and put a proper Linux OS on my phone.

[k999]

Yes, this is a lot of hassle! And those instructions don't work either, mtp-detect hangs and eventually fails. It finds the device, but then it tries to connect, and that fails. Here's what it looks like when I run with sudo:

$ sudo mtp-detect 
libmtp version: 1.1.3

Listing raw device(s)
Device 0 (VID=04e8 and PID=6860) is a Samsung GT-P7310/P7510/N7000/I9100/Galaxy Tab 7.7/10.1/S2/Nexus/Note.
   Found 1 device(s):
   Samsung: GT-P7310/P7510/N7000/I9100/Galaxy Tab 7.7/10.1/S2/Nexus/Note (04e8:6860) @ bus 2, dev 17
Attempting to connect device(s)
PTP_ERROR_IO: failed to open session, trying again after resetting USB interface
LIBMTP libusb: Attempt to reset device
LIBMTP PANIC: failed to open session on second attempt
Unable to open raw device 0
OK.

So no luck there either... Thanks for the tip, though!

[k999]

By the way, I noticed now that I only needed that command to get VID/PID, so I continued with the instructions, but it doesn't work anyway. Now, after I run "android-connect", the phone is mounted:

$ mount
...
mtpfs on /media/GalaxyNexus type fuse.mtpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,user=ubuntu)
$ ls -l /media/GalaxyNexus
ls: cannot access /media/GalaxyNexus: Transport endpoint is not connected
$

The ls command hangs until it times out or something, perhaps 30 or 60 seconds? Listing the media folder looks like this:

$ ls -l /media/
ls: cannot access /media/GalaxyNexus: Transport endpoint is not connected
total 0
d????????? ? ? ? ?            ? GalaxyNexus

[k999]

Seems my remaining options are:

1) reboot to windows and use kies, or
2) install dropbox, google drive, or something like that on the phone and copy everything via some online service, or
3) get an ftp or scp client on the phone, and copy pictures that way.

What an utter pain.

[typos1]

Great, maybe I wont be upgrading to icecream sandwhich then.