Accessing photos and videos stored in iPod Touch or iPhone from desktop computer

Date: Sat Apr 26 2014 iPod Touch »»»» iPhone »»»» iPad »»»» Apple iPod Touch Portable Audio Device

Just had a nice rant about Apple's stupid iTunes policy on uploading files from iPod or iPhone or iPad but I want to move on to some useful utilities I found while searching for a solution. There are solutions but I'd call them workarounds for Apple's intransigence in misdesigning the facilities in these devices.

Phone View is a Mac application that can turn your iPhone or iPod or iPad into a sort of virtual USB disk. You can access a number of other things such as the contacts or bookmarks stored in Safari. It's pretty nice but also pricey. I'm not about to get this because of the price.

There are a few apps out there which, if you've jailbroken your device, can give you complete access to everything. That's tempting..but..

PicsAid is focused only on pictures and video. The company sells other apps for other media types, as well. This app is, also, a bit pricey.

Their website contain some testimonials along the lines of "My laptop was stolen, and now I can't access the stuff I'd loaded into my device." This form of entrapment happens when you copy files onto your mobile device, then somehow lose the copy on your desktop device (such as - it gets stolen). Because there's no way to copy those files from mobile to a different desktop device, your pictures would be trapped inside your mobile device.

i-funbox is a Windows app that's supposed to do some things like the above. Their website doesn't say it's for Windows. But when you download the app it unpacks into a .exe file and you'll have wasted your time in downloading it.

I didn't see these as being a very good solution. Fortunately there are some other solutions that are pretty good...