Plugging Iphone into Mac: Where's the drive?

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Hi,

Whenever I plug my iPhone to my Mac via USB cord, the 'Image Capture' window opens up. The Image Capture window contains my videos and pictures. If I close this window with the intent of opening it again later on, it appears I have to unplug and re-plug the USB cord from the Mac. It's not like inserting a thumb drive when the drive appears on desktop.
 
C

chas_m

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There's no access to the file system, so the iPhone doesn't mount as a drive. Use iCloud, iTunes, iPhoto or Image Capture to manage your assets on the iPhone.
 
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That's strange. I don't know whether if Apple could resolve this or not but with Windows, from my memory, you have the drive constantly there in My Computer.
 
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MacInWin

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That's strange. I don't know whether if Apple could resolve this or not but with Windows, from my memory, you have the drive constantly there in My Computer.
Apple doesn't want to "resolve" it. That's how they designed it. Files you should care about are accessible by iCloud and iTunes or Image Capture. The rest of the files you should not mess with so Apple doesn't support any avenue to get to them.
 
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Files within USB thumb drives, external hard-drives, and CD/DVDs are accessible by an icon on desktop once inserted into the Mac. I still don't understand why an iPhone should be an exception. It doesn't mess with the security of the OS or causes user inconvenience in any way.
 
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Files within USB thumb drives, external hard-drives, and CD/DVDs are accessible by an icon on desktop once inserted into the Mac. I still don't understand why an iPhone should be an exception. It doesn't mess with the security of the OS or causes user inconvenience in any way.

A Mac whether a laptop of DT computer runs on OS X (Mavericks current version) which will 'mount' USB drives, SD cards, etc. - the files can be viewed in Finder. Apple's iDevices (e.g. iPhone & iPad) run on iOS, a completely different operating system - apps are generally 'sandboxed' and their associated files are kept w/i that location; so unless you want to 'jailbreak' your device(s), then you need to simply understand and accept the difference. Dave :)
 
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On a different topic though, why did Apple implement iTunes? Pardon my ignorance but I need an education on this. iTunes seems more of an inconvenience than anything.

1) Many people like the 'click and drag' method because it's so much more convenient
2) If you want to modify (reduce, add) media in your iPhone, you cannot do it on any computer, besides yours, it seems
 

bobtomay

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One simple word - pirating.

And likely the means Apple came up with to got all the record labels to sign up to allow downloading their digital content to prevent people from just connecting an iPod to any old computer and transferring all their content from person to person.
 

IWT


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Simonvee

Going back to your very first post in this thread; you can easily configure things so that when you connect your iPhone, Image Capture opens as now, or iPhoto opens automatically, or nothing happens (apart from opening iTunes—in fact you can even configure iTunes via preferences not to open either).

This allows you to choose what you want to do when iPhone connected. For example, you connect to your Mac via USB—nothing happens—Manually open iTunes, say, or manually open iPhoto, do one then the other in any order you like. So, if all you want is to sync with iTunes, that's all that happens. Or, if all you want to do is download photos or videos, ditto.

So there is choice there. Nothing has to be automatic unless you want it to be.

Ian
 

dtravis7


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I think Bobtomay hit the nail right on the head with his post.

Piracy.
 
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There is 3rd party software available that will let you access your iPhone's file system to a limited degree from a PC or Mac without jailbreaking it. I've found this useful for getting at the data for apps that had no option to export it, nor supported saving to iCloud. I got really annoyed at a game once and heavily modified its assets to get rid of some annoying social media nagging every time I completed a level. The two that come to mind are iFunBox and iExplorer.
 

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