How do I transfer photos from an iphone 4S to my PC?

Question

Hi there,
My wife took a bunch of photos on her work iPhone 4S that I am struggling to transfer to my PC. Here are the things I have tried and failed:
using iTunes - iTunes apparently backed up the iPhone onto my hard drive, but I can't figure out where this is; there is no "Photo" option under the iPhone subheading in the list on the left hand side of the iTunes window; clicking the photos tab on the iPhone window in iTunes invites me to sync photos from itunes to the phone, but not from the phone to iTunes (there's my suggestion for the next iTunes upgrade!)
Using Windows Explorer - this method was recommended on numerous places I looked, but for me the iPhone never appears as an external drive on my PC... one place I looked at suggested that it may be necessary to turn off the passcode on the iPhone - apparently this is impossible because my wife's work IT people forbid it (I can see why, but where's the trust people?)
Using third party software... OK, I havent tried this... for three reasons:
Are you out of your mind? I need third-party software for an iPhone to do what every digital camera and mobile phone I have ever owned has let me do on a plug-and-play basis - where's the seamless design rationale behind that?;
I'd prefer not to pay for software to do what every digital camera and mobile phone I have ever owned has let me do for free; and
Are you out of your mind?
I'm obviously making this more difficult than it needs to be - I'm sure there is some simple 6 second solution to resolve this that I've not thought of, because all the other file types - music etc I can move from device to device via iTunes with no problem. It just seems to be photos I'm struggling with. Is there an iTunes setting I'm missing? Maybe I need to look harder to where all this stuff backs-up (any info on that would be great), but in my experience these kind of back-ups rarely happenas a file-for-file mirror, but usually as some impenetrable consolidated fle that I lack the expertise to unzip.
For the moment we are emailing these files off the phone, but please don't expect me to believe that this is Apple's master plan for ease of use!!
I hope that this provides all the relevant info to solve the problem. I am completely aware that there is probably some really easy solution to this; I'm new to iPhones, so don't spare my blushes by holding back on the obvious!
Cheers.

Answer 1

Big Bopper, thanks for your continued help. Unfortunately the answer to your question is no. The first time I had plugged an iPhone of any variety into my PC was yesterday, and the only thing that happened when I did this was that iTunes told me I had to enter the access code to the iPhone before I could continue with iTunes. I did this and it all worked fine - except that I can't get photos through iTunes.
(Sometimes I am asked this when I plug in my old-fashioned iPod Classic, and I usually cancel the invitation because I only need to organise my iPod through iTunes. But not for the iPhone.)
I am coming to the conclusion that iTunes just can't be used to manage photos the way it can manage other medie (e.g. songs). I'm not sure why photos are singled out - as an aside, music from my wife's iPhone library synched without me doing anything, and I was surprised to discover today that after re-synching my iPod I had all of my wife's music collection on my iPod, but not her photos. So transferring music  isn't just easy, it's inevitable, but transferring photos is problematic at best (let's face it even if I could go through Windows Explorer to transfer photos, that still would be harder than the way iTunes deals with music). Which is odd given that a user is more likely to have copyright permission over their photos than over their music - you'd think it would be much harder to transfer songs, and pretty straight-forward to transfer photos!
Anyway, thanks for trying to help. I think in this case there is a speed bump in Apple's famous seamless user experience!