I figured out that whole "iPhoto not seeing the iPhone" thing...

Question

...for me, anyway.
Hopefully, it will work for others, as well.
To preface the problem:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1029222
and
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1043884
To briefly summarize:
My iPhone syncs perfectly fine with iTunes. It DID with iPhoto. The last 60 or so photos, every time I try to sync, iPhoto either says "No items to import" or doesn't even see the iPhone at all (but, iTunes and ASP does).
The last couple days, iPhoto never showed it in the list to even tell me there's no photos to import.
So, I came across an idea whilst trying to go to sleep last night. I got the idea from when I was trying to get my massive photo library to work across the network with Connect360 (so I could stream my photos to my XBOX 360). After several emails with Nullriver, we couldn't come up with a solution... that is until, just for grins, I swapped out the library with a new one with just a couple photos. Then it worked fine.
So, my idea was that, for some reason, as the iPhone took on more photos, the less reliable it became when trying to sync to iPhoto, as was certainly the case in my situation. After too many photos, it just ceased recognition. I had 260 photos in my camera reel. This morning I deleted all but the last 80 I couldn't get to sync.
I plug it into my computer, and immediately, iPhoto pops up and asks if I want to import 80 items. I say, "Please, for the love of God." (It's a button in the debug menu
So, if you are having trouble, try deleting out a lot of the old, already synced photos... get your camera reel numbers down to when it actually worked.
Post here if it fixed your problem - or didn't...
Gigabit Ethernet G4   Mac OS X (10.4.10)   Lots of RAM, HD Space, and Apple Lovin'

Answer 1

OK... So, just to make sure it's not my home machine, I plugged my iPhone into my Quad-Core 2.5ghz G5 at work.
Guess what happened?
iTunes popped up and tried to erase everything (Apple needs to fix the 'Automatically sync this iPhone' so that it stays machine independent - as in, if I plug it into my work machine just to harvest the power, I don't want to have to worry about quickly hitting the stop button - but, when I get home, I want my iPhone to automatically sync... but it won't, because it retains the work machine's setting, and vice versa)
iPhoto DIDN'T pop up. I manually opened iPhoto
(a tough task, I know), it SAW the iPhone, but said the usual "There are no items to import." Same thing with Image Capture (0).
So, and here's the kicker... I took 5 more photos...
I plugged it into the Quad-Core...
iTunes popped up fine.
iPhoto didn't.
It also didn't seem to 'see' the iPhone any more.
It's not in the Source list... where is it!
Image Capture only shows my Scanner and no longer the photo import dialog.
My total photos?
A whopping 171...
I'll let you know if it does this when I get home.
OK - nevermind.
I took another 7 photos.
I plugged it in.
Both iTunes and iPhoto popped up.
iPhoto asked if I wanted to import the 178 items.
I wonder if it's some kind of issue with the internal iPhone photo library and it's cataloging... or something.