I am new to darktable, so new that I’m still working on my first import of images. BTW, I’m on Windows 11 and I’m using a Pixel Fold phone.
What I wanted to do is import the images from my phone. I started by trying to import a folder, but my phone doesn’t show up on the folder list. It does show up on the file explorer.
I noticed that “Nexus/Pixel” shows up as a connected camera, but when I try to mount it I get “failed to initialize ‘Google Inc Nexus/Pixel (MTP) on port usb:O… uses are: locked by another application, no access to devices etc”
It would be nice if I could get one of these methods to work, any ideas?
In the mean time I will copy images from my phone to a temporary folder and import from there. Kind of frustrating, but it will get things done.
Or, is there a way I can import from Google Photos?
BTW, I will be using darktable with “real” cameras soon…
Welcome!
Personally, with both phone and cameras, I use Windows Explorer to copy everything to folders on my hard drive, then in darktable I use “add to library” to bring the images into the dt database, without moving them on my file system.
I find this works well, and I’m familiar with this approach from before I got into darktable.
Backing up to an external drive is a simple drag and drop with this method too… not that that would be any harder with other approaches I guess.
Unfortunately I don’t know what the issue would be with using darktable to import from the phone, but you could use my approach in the meantime, without having to worry about temporary folders.
I’m sure others will have more ideas.
Sadly, the MTP implementation in Pixels has always been flaky. Sometimes I have no trouble pulling things from my phone with MTP, other times it just flakes out, so I’ve tended to use other syncing solutions (cloud backup, ADB pull, etc) instead.
It’s not a simple one-click but for occasional use TotalCommander on Android is useful. With the right plugin it can connect to SMB / CIFS shares (and I believe NFS maybe?) via Wi-Fi and can also share via those connections. So I’ve setup file shares on my PC and NAS then on my phone select the images (long press) and share to those file shares with TotalCommander.
