Getting photos and files off of Android 6

Hi,

I've been having a devil of a time trying to get my vacation photos off of my so-called "smart" phone -- Nexus 5 / Android 6.0.1 -- onto my Linux desktop. I wanted to do so directly with a USB connection and not via some other machine, so I rejected my family's offer of their Macs as intermediary. I also rejected going via wireless to my wired machine via my wireless laptop. Plus I rejected loading to the cloud: There's nothing to hide in any of my photos but they are none of Google's business and the 44kbs DSL upload speed is unappetizing when contemplating 7 gigabytes.

Tho every piece of software I tried could see the so-called "smart" phone on a USB connection none of those programs could find a single photo. So I looked and looked through all of the settings I could find on the phone for something which would enable such transfers. Nothing. I did searches for getting photos from my Nexus 5 Android 6.0.1 machine but found only software recommendations, all of which failed. I was and am unwilling to "root" the phone even tho I am quit comfortable with "root" on all my other machines.

I thought that maybe more recent software would fix the problem so I waited for the forthcoming Slackware 14.2 release and, when I got it, the problem persisted. No photos found.

Then I got lucky. I finally plopped the right combination of words into search, and that got me to this:

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In android 6.0 Marshmallow, there is a different procedure to
access your files. Plug in your device:

1. Pull down from the top of your phone/tablet screen.
2. Look for USB for charging - Touch for more options then click it.
3. You now will see a list showing: Charging only, Transfer
files (MTP), Transfer photos (PTP) and MIDI
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The operational words are: "Plug in your device". All of the times I went looking at the phone's setting happened to be when the USB cable was disconnected, and so the "USB for charging" control never showed up. I feel like I was playing the Windows 95 game Myst where you wander around touching everything to look for magically hidden features. Bad design in Android 6.*. The menu should have been there whether the USB cable was connected or not, in the latter case just greyed out.

Anyway as soon as I plugged the device in, found the now un-hidden drop down, clicked on "Transfer photos (PTP)" and ran the latest gphoto2 the photo files were all right there and easily downloaded.

i am just answering this post to get it out of zero reply status.

greybeard, when a thread has zero replies, it keeps floating back to the top of new posts.
in this particular situation, i think it would have been ok to answer your own post with the solution.