Can't see inside \DCIM picture folder on iPhone?

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dsperber
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Joined: 28.03.2010, 01:35

Can't see inside \DCIM picture folder on iPhone?

#1 Post by dsperber » 11.03.2020, 02:13

My cousin has an iPhone (7) and I help out doing things like transferring pictures from phone to PC folders, etc. Today we had such a need, but I ran into a problem. I could browse down to the "Apple Phone" in "This PC" (Win10), and then \Internal storage, and then \DCIM, and then \APPLE100 (or something similar I believe) where the photos are. However FCXE (814) was unable to look further down into this folder. The detail pane remained unchanged, and didn't display the list of individual JPG pictures within that selected folder.

I confirmed that the phone screen was not locked, and that the phone's desktop was being displayed. And it was.

I'm almost certain I've used FCXE to browse her iPhone picture folders in the past, in order to mass-copy things to the PC. And this is the same iPhone she's had for several years. So I don't know if the issue is with FCXE 814, or if it's something I need to do on the iPhone to "unlock" access to the picture folders, or what.

Does anybody know how to access the lowest-level picture folder on the iPhone (connected via USB cable to the PC) so as to see the list of JPG picture files within it?

Note that the full list of this folder's JPG file contents shows up perfectly using ordinary Win10 File Explorer. But the folder's contents are NOT ACCESSIBLE using FCXE 814. I can only drill down through the folder structure in the Explorer Tree pane, but when selecting that lowest-level \APPLE100 data folder its contents don't appear in the details pane.

What am I missing? Or is this a bug in 814??


dsperber
Posts: 221
Joined: 28.03.2010, 01:35

Re: Can't see inside \DCIM picture folder on iPhone?

#3 Post by dsperber » 15.03.2020, 05:21

Turns out I still had build 808 installed on my cousin's PC. Upgraded to latest 815 just to see if it made any difference, and it did. We ran another test, and this time I was able to see inside the \100APPLE folder (as well as the multiple \nnnCLOUD folders, each of which previously was also not providing its contents).

So I thought this might have been somehow tied to older software, and fixed in newer software, despite my deja vu that I'd seen this many times in the past over the years so it didn't seem much tied to a particular version of FCXE but rather something inherent in its design. Anyway, sure again, tonight as we worked, even with 815 in use I once again saw the symptom. This was even after guaranteeing that the iPhone screen was "unlocked" (which IS a situation where you will not be provided access to INTERNAL STORAGE of the phone).

Turns out we had to play around, unplugging the USB cable, waiting, re-plugging the USB cable, and then the \DCIM folder became visible and readable again. So it seems like a really unstable interface between IOS and iPhone access to the \DCIM contents, and FCXE and/or Windows. Screwing around with unlocking the screen and/or playing with the USB cable connection seems to overcome temporary "invisibility" of the \DCIM folder.

However...

I have reported this MANY TIMES in the past, and that is that there is something very weird about how FCXE displays the \DCIM folder on the iPhone (but not on Samsung/Android phones, where internal and external storage folders play very nice with Windows and present themselves like normal external removable drives, and do not present as the following iPhone screenshot shows).

For some reason, with the "Apple Phone" the entire \DCIM folder structure is DUPLICATED BY FCXE. The detail folder contents contents are shown not when the "primary" folder structure is selected in the Explorer Tree pane, but only when the "duplicated" folder structure is selected, as seen in the following screenshot (Win10).

Image

Here is what the same iPhone looks like using regular File Explorer (Win10), although the same thing holds using Windows Explorer in Win7.

Image

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