After purchasing a new iPhone, I setup all my personal stuff on my new 3GS and everything seemed to go ok. After a month or so I realized that iPhoto and Picasa both had problems reading the photos database on my iPhone. This happened on both my Mac and my PC. There were lots of suggestions online as to how to fix this but none of them worked for me.
The Mac has a tool called Image Capture that is usually more reliable than iPhoto. It was able to see 2 png files on my iPhone that didn’t really exist. I couldn’t delete them but yet they were supposedly there. I know they didn’t exist because I literally scoured the entire OS looking for photo configuration files. I also ran a unix find to search for files by name and a grep to look for file contents. Nothing was found.
I finally found the file causing the problem. It was hiddden in the iTunes_Control folder. I deleted it and then reconnected via Picasa, at which point iOS recreated the file. Everything was back to normal. The file was /var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control/iTunes/iPhotoAlbumPrefs.
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How’d you delete the files manually from your phone?
Hey Sam, you have to be jailbroken to do this. I used the cydia app “iFile” but you could do it via any SFTP application if you have Open SSH installed.
Hi Mark,
so let me get this straight…the file to be deleted is on my phone not my Mac, and if my phone’s not jailbroken, I’m out of luck?
Thanks!
Yes, the file is on the iPhone. This is the only way I was able to find that would fix the error. There may be other ways without being jailbroken. If you fin another way, please post here!
Nonsense! Lisa, use iexplorer.
Hi, came across this when I had the same error.
Thanks for the solution.
Note that Apple renamed the file (iOS 5.0.1) to PhotosFolderPrefs in the same folder.
Since my phone isn’t jailbroken, this wouldn’t work for me. I usually hate eHow, but this worked for me – http://www.ehow.com/info_12202237_picasa-error-9912.html. I used image capture on my MacBook to import everything, then I deleted all the images and video from my phone. Now it works!