14

I would report this as a bug, but I'm in my 50s and reading the bug reporting requirements would make me a bug specialist and take me about a week to insure I was reporting it properly. I'm an end user. Sorry. On installation of 14.04.1 about 5 days ago and on plugging into a USB 2.0 from computer to Nikon L20 camera, Shotwell reports:

Shotwell Unable to fetch previews from the camera: Could not claim the USB device (-53)

This is a bug, as netsearching the above shows a Canon camera as having the same report. If the camera, while connected via USB cable to the computer is powered up, the above is the error message. See Launchpad

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/shotwell/+question/157569

for other infos. If you read this and can make a Launchpad bug report please do so. If I can help in any way whatsoever, let me know. Thank you, Ubuntu Community.

1
  • Not real work around but helped me with shotwell quirks I'm not sure why but shotwell is often having issues with downloading from cameras. Install Rapid photo downloader, this is PPA to use dlynch3
    – danijelc
    Dec 13, 2014 at 9:34

7 Answers 7

20

This is this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/shotwell/+bug/1400470

As a workaround for now, try unmouting the camera in Nautilus and starting Shotwell.

3
  • This works for other desktops too I'm on mate on debian which desktop management is made thru caja, and worked perfectly Jan 26, 2017 at 13:34
  • For 17.10 and an Iphone running 10.3.x shotwell just doesn't find the photo export, it finds a document export (the file manager does, but doesn't seem to list anything inside)
    – Digikata
    Jun 8, 2017 at 3:30
  • But the camera isn't mounted — that's the problem. If it was mounted I'd be able to see who had grabbed it. Some rogue stray process grabs the camera the moment it gets plugged in, and that denies access to everything else. May 31, 2018 at 8:43
3

One way I got round it (connecting a Cannon EOS 700 to Linux Kubuntu with Shotwell) was simply to use another of my PC's USB connectors. Suddenly one of the other USB connectors around the back of the PC worked. Don't ask me why. I hope this helps others.

1

This issue is caused by Nautilus mounting the camera automatically and therefore locking the device.

One workaround that did work very well for me was to disable the automounting in Nautilus as described in detail here: How to disable automount in nautilus's preferences

When you disable the automounting, you can still mount the external devices manually, if needed, by clicking on them in Nautilus.

0

I was having the same problem.

I have a Nikon D7200 and I have 2 SD cards in it. Removing one card seems to fix the problem. I only need one card anyway since the second one is used as backup.

0

I had the same issue on Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS

I simply utilized the import from folder option: CtrlI (which is perfectly happy to use the phone when it's mounted. enter image description here

0

I had success by quitting Shotwell and reopening, was able to access photos in left panel: documents on [iphone name]

0

This is a bit off-topic. Unmounting didn't work on my Redmi device (it does work on Samsung), because it kept resetting the phone, asking to connect again. Disable automount would probably work. But because of this and other annoyances with Shotwell, I made a script to sync photos into folders with YYYY-MM. It only transfers new files:

#!/bin/bash

source=`echo -n /run/user/*/gvfs/*/*/DCIM/Camera`
months=`ls "$source" | cut -d_ -f2 | grep -E '[0-9]{6}' | cut -c1-6 | sort | uniq`

for month in $months
do
    echo "Syncing $month"
    dest="$HOME/Pictures/${month:0:4}-${month:4:2}"
    mkdir -p $dest
    rsync --ignore-existing -v "$source"/*_${month}??_*.* $dest/
done

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