Getting iPhoto to recognize your updated iOS 5 device

It’s almost embar­rass­ing that I had­n’t tried trans­fer­ring my pho­tos off of my iPhone 4—running iOS 5— in near­ly a month since upgrad­ing. I sup­pose with the iCloud ser­vice, many users won’t ever have an issue with this. How­ev­er, Angela and I share a iTunes account and don’t real­ly care to have our pho­tos dou­bled on one anoth­er’s com­put­ers. She does­n’t care about my goofy Insta­gram pho­tos and don’t need to see the pho­tos of some office baby show­er. There­fore, we still back up our pho­tos on our com­put­ers man­u­al­ly via iPho­to, or at least we’d planned to.

When we plugged our phones into our com­put­ers today, we real­ized that the iPhone device or cam­era roll weren’t show­ing up in iTunes. Even check­ing the Image Cap­ture on the mac did­n’t show the cam­era. After some hunt­ing around, I final­ly found the solu­tion. It’s not one I would have ever thought to do and it real­ly strikes me as odd that Apple did­n’t ham­mer this out already with all the oth­er upgrades required for using iOS 5.

To get iPho­to to rec­og­nize your iOS 5 device, do the following:

  1. Eject your iPhone or iPad if it is connected.

  2. Using Find­er and select the iPho­to Library file in the Pic­tures fold­er in your home directory.

  3. Right click and select Show Pack­age Con­tents from the pop-up menu.

    The inter­nal fold­er struc­ture of the file is displayed.

    Tip: It may be help­ful dis­play items in a list, as there are quite a few files in the iPho­to Library.

  4. (Option­al) Right click on the fold­er named iPod Pho­to Cache and select Com­press “iPod Pho­to Cache” from the pop-up menu.

    This will give you a back up copy, in case some­thing should go wrong. How­ev­er, this is an auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed fold­er so you real­ly should­n’t lose anything.

  5. Right click on the fold­er named iPod Pho­to Cache and select Move to Trash.

  6. Recon­nect your iPhone or iPad to your computer

    You should see the device appear in iPho­to, where you can import pho­tos and videos as with pre­vi­ous ver­sion of iOS.

    If you hap­pen to still have the con­tents of the iPho­to Library still show­ing in Find­er, you’ll notice that the fold­er you just delet­ed gets gen­er­at­ed using the new data­base struc­ture used in iOS 5.

Accord­ing to Roy­al­wise Solu­tions, this issue stems from a change in the data­base used by iOS ver­sions 2 through 4.3.3 is no longer used in iOS 5.0. Thanks to them for pro­vid­ing the details on how to fix this issue. Easy solu­tion but not some­thing most users are like­ly to fig­ure out on their own (I know I could­n’t, anyway).

Published
Categorized as Apple

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

16 comments

  2. Worked per­fect­ly, thank you. I think this is just a ploy to get peo­ple to buy the new iLife…

  4. THANK YOU! I hunt­ed every­where last night for a fix for this. I final­ly found your solu­tion this evening!

  6. Thank you for pro­vid­ing this solu­tion to a prob­lem that it took me 6 hrs. of search through Apple dis­cus­sion group and oth­er web­sites with­out success.

    Keep the good work and I sug­gest you might post a link in Apple Dis­cus­sion to this.

  7. Fol­low­ing these steps did not solve my prob­lem. Still iPho­to shows no devices. I’m using Moun­tain Lion and IOS 6.0.1.

  8. The above did not work for me. Moun­tain Lion + 6.0.2
    HOWEVER I did fig­ure it out like magic.

    First, the above did not rebuild my iPho­to library. How­ev­er I dis­cov­ered hold­ing down Com­mand-Option-Shift while launch­ing iPho­to presents you with sev­er­al options for rebuild­ing the library. I chose the bot­tom one as it appear the most extreme.

    It had no effect. I tried clos­ing all top menu bar util­i­ties one at a time.
    No effect.

    I tried flip­ping my con­nec­tor cable the oth­er direc­tion. No effect.

    I tried using a dif­fer­ent con­nec­tor cable for my iPhone 5. WORKED instantly.
    Went back to 1st cable. DID NOT WORK.

    Used 1st cable in oth­er USB PORT (flipped ports) — DID NOT WORK.
    Used 2nd cable in the oppo­site port — STILL WORKED.

    It’s the USB cables.

    Now. I don’t know which is which. Which was pro­vid­ed by Apple and which came with my car charg­er adapter pack — but one is clear­ly deficient.

    You might try adding this to your solu­tion above… thank you for get­ting me on the right track.!!! You don’t know how aggra­vat­ing this has been.

  9. In short — do not use 3rd par­ty USB con­nec­tor cables with the iPhone 5. Well, they appear to work for charg­ing, but for what­ev­er rea­son iPho­to does­n’t like them.

  10. Actu­al­ly no, wait — I take that back — I don’t know which cable is which. They look slight­ly dif­fer­ent though. Any­ways hope­ful­ly this puts some­one else on the right track.

  11. Actu­al­ly now that I think about it — I have nev­er been able to get iPho­to to work with the iPhone 5 right from day 1. And I did not buy the car charg­er until a cou­ple weeks lat­er. I’m sus­pi­cious that it’s the APPLE cables that don’t work… Try going and buy­ing a $20 car charg­er adapter and use THAT cable to see if it makes iPho­to work.

  13. Thank you so much for the tip! I’ve had the most dif­fi­cult time get­ting iPho­to so “see” my iPad to upload my pic­tures and your tip final­ly helped me do it! Thanks so much for posting!!!!

  14. Thanks a mil­lion, this thing was dri­ving me mad and you are the only one who had a solu­tion that fixed it.
    Regards

  16. You are the great­est!!! I was total­ly stuck try­ing to get my pic­tures into a pre­sen­ta­tion in a time crunch. This is an awe­some solution.

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