For some reason when I plug my camera into my computer via usb, it is not being recognized... it does recognize a flash drive, but not my camera. I have a sony cybershot camera. Does anyone know why it wouldn't be recognizing it and how I could fix it? I just need to put the pictures on my camera onto the computer. Thanks!

After hooking up camera are you turning on the camera?

yes, I've tried it a few different ways... I've tried plugging the camera in while ubuntu is running and turning the camera on of course, and I've also tried shutting the computer down and plugging the camera in, then booting ubuntu... it never acknowledges the camera at all, even when I go in to open it up manually... it's like it's not plugged in at all, yet the flash drive shows up... that's what I don't understand

With the camera plugged in, try running lsusb as root from the command line and post the output here. That should let us know whether it's being seen at all.

If that doesn't return anything, you can try dmesg. Be forewarned that it returns much more output than lsusb.

Do you have a separate switch to change modes? On the Canon I use there is a switch which in the up position is for photos, in the down position for uploading photos to a computer. Do you have a users manual to check?

Here was the output when I ran lsusb

Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 064e:a127 Suyin Corp.
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 054c:0295 Sony Corp.

I'm a total newb with computers, guys, but I see the word "sony" in there lol. So apparently it's picking it up?? And no my camera doesn't have any kind of switch... it's a simple point and shoot. I could always work it fine through vista, granted I had the software installed on vista and don't on ubuntu. I lost the disc, idk if it would even be compatible with ubuntu anyway. Thanks for helping me out! Does anyone have any idea what I can do now?

I don't understand. Does the camera show up as a flash drive, or are you just saying that flash drives work?

I was just comparing the two... the camera isn't showing up when it's plugged in with a usb cable, but when I put in a flash drive, the flash drive shows up just fine.

I would suspect the camera is a MTP device which can not be mounted like a flash drive. Check gphoto2 to see if your camera model is supported.

In a nutshell cameras and music players can use two protocols, i.e. mass storage devices aka just like a USB memory device and MTP/PTP. You need special software to access a MTP device directly which is what gphoto2 uses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol

And as you suspect windows software is not compatible linux so it does not matter that you lost the CD that came with the camera.

http://www.gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php

Thanks so much! I changed the setting on the camera from mass storage to PictBridge and it worked like a charm! Thanks again!