Accessing Iphone 7s photos on Ubuntu 16.04

I have tons of photos on my iPhone 7s and was looking to download them onto my MacBook Pro. I swapped the harddisk in my Macbook Pro (2011 edition!) with an SSD and was stuck with the perennial low disk space problem on an SSD!

The only solution I could think of was to access photos on my Ubuntu desktop with lots of space.

I plugged in the iPhone into the desktop running Ubuntu 16.04. "Trusted" the desktop and was able to see that the iPhone was identified in the File Explorer.

However, despite many tries the photos were simply not getting imported in to my Ubuntu machine.

I looked around for various solutions but most them did not work. This post and this gist were the only posts that finally worked for me!

The steps I ran are as follows:

bash

sudo apt-get install automake libtool pkg-config libplist-dev libplist++-dev python-dev libssl-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev libfuse-dev

sudo apt-get install ideviceinstaller python-imobiledevice libimobiledevice-utils python-plist usbmuxd

sudo apt-get install libtool autoconf automake

sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev python-dev

mkdir -p ~/usr/src

cd ~/usr/src

for x in libplist libusbmuxd usbmuxd libimobiledevice ifuse; do git clone https://github.com/libimobiledevice/${x}.git;done

# Build libplist

cd ~/usr/src/libplist
./autogen.sh --prefix="$HOME/usr"
make && sudo make install

# Build libusbmuxd

sudo apt-get remove usbmuxd

cd ~/usr/src/libusbmuxd
./autogen.sh --prefix="$HOME/usr"
make && sudo make install

# Build libimobiledevice

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

cd ~/usr/src/libimobiledevice
./autogen.sh --prefix="$HOME/usr"
make && sudo make install

# Build usbmuxd

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

cd ~/usr/src/usbmuxd
./autogen.sh --prefix="$HOME/usr"
make && sudo make install

# Build ifuse

sudo apt-get install libfuse-dev


cd ~/usr/src/ifuse
./autogen.sh --prefix="$HOME/usr"
make && sudo make install

Connect iPhone

Run usbmuxd

Plug in the iPhone

Ensure the iPhone is recognized by running dmesg | grep ipheth

Mount iPhone

sudo mkdir /media/iPhone
sudo chmod 777 /media/iPhone

Edit your ifuse configuration

sudo gedit /etc/fuse.conf

Add these two line under the #Allow non-root...

op$
user_allow_other

Pair iPhone

# pair iphone
idevicepair pair
# I had to keep the phone unlocked BEFORE running this command!

#mount iphone
ifuse /media/iPhone

That's it! I was able to mount iPhone as file system and download photos from /media/iPhone/DCIM!!!

Finally, make sure to unmount the iPhone

Unmount iPhone

# unmount
fusermount -u /media/iPhone/

# unpair
idevicepair unpair