Shotwell can't access camera

When I plug in my Cannon 50D camera with a USB cable into my laptop (running Ubuntu 19.10) and Shotwell pops up. But when I click on the 'Cannon Digital Camera' entry on the left sidebar an error message pops up that says,
"The camera is locked by another application. Please close any other application using the camera and try again."
I don't have any other applications open. Any ideas? It's not a fatal problem since I can access all the camera's photos with the file browser, but it's much for convenient to just click the little 'Import' button and have all my pics sorted by dates. Thanks.


I had the same symptoms with my Android phone, trying to import from it.

In file explorer, I could see that the device was mounted as a disk. I ejected it (unmounted, leaving it physically connected), and from there, shotwell was able to import my pics.


Worked for me too iphone 4s, ubuntu 20.04, shotwell 0.8.3

  1. connected the phone
  2. unmounted the two disk «Documents sur […]» and «Iphone» from the dash
  3. opened Shotwell, clicked on my phone and imported