The steps required are roughly these:
- Connect your Android phone to your laptop using a USB cable.
- Select "Transfer files" on the Android phone pop up that shows up
- On the laptop run the following in your shell (I'm using
bash):
[ -d ~/phone ] || mkdir ~/phone ; jmtpfs ~/phone
Note: I prefer jmtpfs over plain old mtpfs since I've seen fewer hangs
with it. If your distro of choice does not have jmtpfs head on over to Nix
(or just build it from scratch).
All of the data on the phone should now be accessible under ~/phone.
If you are like me and have a zillion photos in the DCIM/Camera subdirectory,
first get the name of the photo you need to copy (click on the photo and look
at the "Details", available from the right hand side top menu). Then, on the
laptop use the name as the argument to cp/mv the file since an ls listing with
a large directory (or even trying to tab-complete the name from the shell) can
take forever.