Is there a way to get any Android phone to do PTP transfer?

[mikeymikec]

I think the answer is no, but I thought I'd ask.

Some phones have the option to change the USB transfer protocol to PTP, which makes the phone present itself to the computer as a digital camera so that when the user runs a program to retrieve digital camera photos, only the camera photos are targeted (as opposed to MTP or as a USB mass storage device, then the photo acquisition system ends up copying every image it can access from the device).

I tried enabling developer options on a customer's Sony Experia E2003 phone but that just gave me the option to do USB debugging.

The only other possibility I can think of would be if there's an app to change the phone's behaviour or an app that can temporarily make the phone present itself as a PTP device.

The reason why I'm asking is that while I personally would just browse the phone's folder structure and drag and drop the files I wanted, many of my customers are not that confident with file management techniques and so a method of simply transferring the files would have been better. With that particular phone I ended up using 'Sony Media Go' on the PC but it's not the most user-friendly app on the planet.

 

[sweenish]

When a phone is plugged in, you can switch modes by tapping the notification. I'm on 5.1.1. Pretty sure that's how it's worked for awhile, though.

Airdroid exists for people like this, though. If Airdroid is too hard, I don't see how viewing the phone as a camera is any easier.

 

[mnewsham]

When a phone is plugged in, you can switch modes by tapping the notification. I'm on 5.1.1. Pretty sure that's how it's worked for awhile, though.

Airdroid exists for people like this, though. If Airdroid is too hard, I don't see how viewing the phone as a camera is any easier.

Been that way since 2.0 at least, that was my first android so not sure about before that.

 

[mikeymikec]

When a phone is plugged in, you can switch modes by tapping the notification. I'm on 5.1.1. Pretty sure that's how it's worked for awhile, though.

I tried this, it didn't do anything.

Airdroid exists for people like this, though. If Airdroid is too hard, I don't see how viewing the phone as a camera is any easier.

I'll have a look at airdroid.