Just as a test, I plugged my iPhone into my laptop to see if anything has improved since the last time I tried to access anything on my iPhone from Linux, and after confirming various passcodes, it showed-up in the Files browser.
It's almost as if it's my own phone!
There's a lot of numbered directories in there and after a moment I realized that these are just all the photos on the phone. It would be nice if I could access other things, but really this is the only thing I want off the phone, so I'm not going to complain.
Browsing through these directories is tedious, but maybe the Photos app can do something with this?
I backed-up the existing files in the Pictures directory just in case (plus I've been having some trouble getting the Photos app to parse some of them) and clicked "Import Photos". It started doing something...
After a few minutes I started to see the actual photos being imported. This is promising!
It might sound dumb, but this is very exciting. For years I've written most of my blog posts on my phone, not because I like typing with my thumbs, but because it's been because that's where most of the photos I take are, and it's been way more work than it should be to get photos from my iPhone on to my Linux laptops. I had been using an app that backs them up over ssh, but it's pretty flaky. If I can periodically import photos from my phone this way, it's going to make it a lot easier to write better posts using an actual computer! Hopefully it's clever enough not to re-import the same photos during successive sessions.
Let's test that. After disconnecting the iPhone, taking one photo and reconnecting, the Photos app automatically jumps to this view:
It stays here for ...awhile. I noticed that the iPhone shows-up in the Files app, but it doesn't appear to be mounted.
Let's see if mounting it helps... not really. After mounting the iPhone I restarted the Photos app but the result is the same "Starting import, please wait..." message.
Since that wasn't working I tried importing the images by selecting the mounted iPhone like a folder (repeating the initial import). That sat on the "Importing..." screen for five minutes or so before I got impatient and stopped it. When I have more time I'll let that run longer and monitor the logs to see if either it eventually works or if there's some errors occuring.
While that's annoying, I'm honestly surprised it works at all. Apple goes to great measures to prevent the iPhone from being used with anything other than their own products, so it's no surprise to me that the integration with Elementary and its Photos app isn't perfect. Hopefully with a little debugging I can figure out what's going on, and if I can't fix it myself, bring it to the Photo app's developers and see what they can do.