Can images be read from an iPhone programmatically using CreateFile in Windows?

Question

When an iPhone is connected to a Win7 computer, the images can be viewed using Explorer (and the open file dialog of my app). However, the file location does not contain a drive letter.

For example Computer\Apple iPhone\Internal Storage\DCIM\800AAAAA\IMG_0008.JPG instead of E:\DCIM\800AAAAA\IMG_0008.JPG which is common of sdcards, usb drives, etc...

I've tried using CreateFileW to read images from an iPhone but it fails with '(Error Code: 3) The system cannot find the path specified.' I've also tried accessing them with Chrome and it fails too.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The folder is actually what is referred to as a 'Virtual Folder' and does not have a full path on the file system. You will need to use the shell item returned from the open dialog to get the content of the file rather than using CreateFile.

The data should be accessible, but you should follow the instructions from the MSDN documentation. I'm sure there are probably better examples (as this only gives guidelines).

edit the rough process is to get the IShellItem from IFileOpenDialog, then to bind to the stream and then read the stream (assuming reading only) - bear in mind that this code is pretty much without error handling or checking or safety:

if (pitem->GetDisplayName(SIGDN_NORMALDISPLAY, &destName) == S_OK) {
    std::cout << destName << std::endl;
    CoTaskMemFree(destName);
}
IStream *pistream;
if (pitem->BindToHandler(0, BHID_Stream, IID_PPV_ARGS(&pistream)) == S_OK) {
    char input[1024];
    long to_read = 1024;
    unsigned long read;
    while (S_OK == pistream->Read(input, to_read, &read)) {
       std::cout << input << std::endl;
    }
    pistream->Release();
}
pitem->Release();