Hoping to download some of the photos on my mother's iphone, I hooked it up to my laptop with its cable. I don't use an iphone or any other smartphone myself, and had no idea whether a Linux system can read the iphone format; but I thought I would try it and see what happened. I've never tried reading one--had no reason to. It did appear in my Thunar window, but trying to open it produced an error message. I forgot to copy the text, but it said something to the effect of "lockdown error." No matter, my mother said she'd e-mail the photos. It's only a curiosity. Is an iphone just unreadable in Linux?

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Hmm, I see we're supposed to have workarounds for this problem...http://www.upubuntu.com/2012/02/fix-...rror-when.html

Apple for some reason is actively hostile to Linux. There is, for example, no iTunes for Linux. I suspect that there would be no iTunes for Windows if Windows did not have such massive market share.

A web search for "iphone linux" turns up a number of articles about connecting to iPhones with Linux, but none of the ones I glanced at were quick fixes by any stretch.

Hmmm, I've never tried to do it, personally, but... wouldn't that be a HUGE security flaw if you could plug my phone into your computer and see all my photos? If you were designing the iPhone, wouldn't you encrypt the data?

I don't think there is any Linux OS that will do this in a default installation. Generally, you will need to install additional software and then should be able to access at least the photos from an iphone. Updates on your iphone may cause a previously working solution to fail on Linux. The most detailed explanation I have found that works is for Ubuntu as explained in detail at the link below.

https://my30daysoflinux.blogspot.com...on-ubuntu.html

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What iOS is on he iPhone? As far as I know iTunes is required.
Google Photos app to sync photos to cloud is another option.

The Apple iCloud can be used, too. Save photos there, use a browser to download to your PC.

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Yep. Or use can put the photos on Dropbox from the iPhone and retrieve them from Dropbox on the Linux box. That's what I do.

As for why Linux can't read the photos: I think it's just because iOS stores them in a proprietary format.

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I was able to do this some years back with my wife's iPhone 4. I use Slackware and had to install something that I cannot remember now. It was possible back then but may not be now. Good luck!

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did you try exporting them over blue tooth ?
or do this
https://www.addictivetips.com/ubuntu...hone-on-linux/

I'll work on the link, but I think my laptop has either a damaged Bluetooth adapter or no Bluetooth adapter at all, because it and my own phone never detect each other with visibility on. I buy my laptops used, and if my Thinkpad T420i was supposed to have Bluetooth (it had to have, because the older T400 I used to use had an adapter), the previous owner probably pulled the adapter.

On the contrary, Demoimedo's useful distro critiques often mention that the distro has connectivity to iPhones by default.

Two recent ones (search the page for "iphone"):

MX Linux: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/mx-18-lenovo.html

Fedora: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/...op-nvidia.html