29 May 2008

Copying Pictures from the iPhone

Im thinking of upgrading the firmware of the iPhone to 1.1.4. Before I do that however, I needed to move out the pictures Ive taken. For some strange reason, my Windows machine, which has iTunes on, refused to recognise the iPhone as a camera. Or rather it did, but when I accessed it as a 'drive', it didn't copy over the photos. It would display the listing of the files, but when I do a drag-n-drop, the copied files would be 0 bytes. Very strange.

Also iTunes doesnt make it obvious on how to sync the pictures which I've taken. Doubly strange.

Giving up on that, its back to Linux to help me out on this rather simple task
  1. Make sure your iPhone is connected to wifi.
  2. Find out the address by going to Settings / Wi-Fi, and tapping on the wifi details. It should display the IP address there, e.g. 192.167.1.78
  3. Also in Settings, go to the General / Auto-Lock menu and set the time-out to "Never". Otherwise the wireless will cut off. Don't know why the options are restricted to only 5 minutes.
  4. On the linux shell, use this command:
    • scp -rp root@192.168.1.78:/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/100APPLE .
  5. This should copy all the files in the directory where the photos are stored.
    • -r is for recursive and
    • -p is to preserve the time and date
  6. The default password for ssh in an iPhone is 'alpine' for the 1.1.3 firmware.
Thats all to it. You can also do some interesting stuff with rsync, but I just wanted my pictures out before the machine gets wiped.

yk