So the iOS 4 update solved the number one problem I had with my phone (an iPhone 3GS). In previous OS versions, if you had ever saved a photo to your photo roll (one attached to an email you received, say) it would make your iPhone invisible to the computer as a camera when you plugged it in and tried to sync those photos to the base machine. iTunes would work just fine, and you could do your thing with songs and movies and apps and so forth, but no more firing up Image Capture or iPhoto and having the iPhone appear as a device in the listings there.
The way around this, according to some threads I found on Apple’s support forums, was to go through the entire iPhone photo library and delete all the offending images, leaving only photos and videos taken with the phone itself. A nice solution if you discover the problem early on, but when you have hundreds and hundreds of photos in there—and they don’t give any indication of which ones are native and which ones were imported via mail or the web—it isn’t such a nice thing to have to deal with.
I did find a nice app called JuicePhone that let me make a browsable backup of everything on my phone. The best part: it didn’t require me to jailbreak the phone, something I have no particular desire or need to do. The other best part: it was free. A nice piece of software to keep around even in this glorious age of iOS 4, when the photo sync issue has been fixed. (I just finished using Image Capture to grab all 3.whatever GB of videos and photos off of the phone and make additional backups of them.)
