Can no longer get photos off iPhone

Question

For months, whenever I put my iPhone into its cradle to recharge/sync, if there were any photos in its "Camera Roll," iPhoto automatically launched, identified/connected to the iPhone, indicated how many photos were available, and offered to download them.
Suddenly, that all stopped. iPhoto no longer automatically launches when I connect the iPhone. (I've checked the Image Capture application, and it's still set to launch iPhoto when it detects a camera.) When I manually launch iPhoto, it recognizes the presence of the iPhone, but says "There are no items to import," even though there are new photos in the Camera Roll.
I don't know what changed — whether the new iPhone or iTunes software caused a problem, or it's something else. I haven't changed anything in my setup, or how things are connected.
(1) Is there any way I can pull the photos from the iPhone onto my Mac? Some application, whether iPhoto or another, that can "see" and "extract" or "import" the photos from the phone? The only thing I know to do now is to e-mail them to myself from the phone, which works, but is clumsy and salvages only 25% of the initial resolution of the photos.
(2) Ideally, I'd like iPhoto to resume behaving like it did before, recognizing the iPhone and the presence of its photos. Anything I can do to assist in that process? I've spent hours searching the Apple support library without finding anything that sounds like this. (The only item there talks about the need to first unlock a password-protected iPhone, but mine isn't password-protected.)
Thank you...

Answer 1

I'd try to reset the phone a couple ways first to see if there is a phone glitch.
hold both buttons 10 seconds until you get the apple to force a restart
Settings > General > Reset > Reset All Settings
If that doesn't do it see if /Applications/Image Capture can see them
Outside of that try to import photos from a different computer and see if it has the same issue. If you can do it I would delete them and put them on a flash drive then bring it back and try it with a single new test picture.
Make sure you Apple > Software Update is up to date and iPhone software is 2.1
You may be looking at a restore situation so I'd File > transfer Purchases and otherwise back up your information.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1737