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You could try using the free (gratis) ES File Explorer file manager on your Android phone.

Among a lot of functionality, it has an FTP server. So, if you can network your phone and your computer, you can easily transfer files both ways from your computer. I do it all the time from Ubuntu and Fedora machines (via Thunar).

The FTP server mode in this app is called "Remote Manager", it's under the Tools section.

Most modern file managers will accept the following syntax:

ftp://phone_ip_address:port

Basically this should be as easy as using a memory stick.
Unfortunately this is not the case. But like other integrations Linux will catch up.

In the meantime you could use WiFi and sshd on Linux and an sftp-client on the smartphone side.

Or use the Linux adb CLI to use usb-transfers.

I agree it's not as easy as it should be. For example, KDE has an implementation of MTP, but it can only read images, not write them (at least in my version).

I found it was far easier to do it over the network. There are multiple ways to do this. Usuario mentioned ES File Explorer.

I used this free and open source Android FTP server and found it straightforward. You specify a username and password, then run the FTP server (it's very clear whether the server is running, and easy to enable/disable).

Then, you simply use any FTP client (there are many graphical clients, e.g. I used Konqueror). I was able to write the files back to the phone easily.

The only downsides are that it's probably a little slower than it would be with an efficient USB protocol, and that FTP is not secure (everything is in cleartext). It should be possible to do the same thing, but with an Android SFTP server; I just haven't personally found one yet.

Assuming you're using a USB connection, I found it works, but you need to do things in a specific order:

• Don't plug in the phone to start with.


• On the phone, go into Settings -> Wireless and Network -> USB Utilities, and click the "Connect store to PC". The phone will say "Connect USB cable to use mass storage".


• Now plug in the USB cable to the phone. It should show the "green android" icon and USB connected message.

(I think my phone has an older version of Android, hopefully this works in the general case).

mtpfs - FUSE filesystem for Media Transfer Protocol devices

apt-get install mtpfs

Done. Works as with Windows in Linux Mint/Ubuntu/etc.

After looking for a bunch of solutions to this problem, I've found Android File Transfer for Linux. This is the best MTP implementation for Linux, it just works.

You can see that this problem has been stated in The List of Major Linux Problems on the Desktop.

Linux doesn't have a reliably working hassle free fast native (directly mountable via the kernel; FUSE doesn't cut it) MTP implementation. In order to work with your MTP devices, like ... Linux based Android phones you'd better use ... Windows or MacOS X. Update: a Russian programmer was so irked by libMTP he wrote his own complete Qt based application which talks to the Linux kernel directly using libusb. Meet Android-File-Transfer-Linux.

I do this via FTP network created by ES File Explorer.

First of all, make your device as a portable hotspot in settings → Tethering & portable hotspot → check "Portable wifi hotspot", and then connect your PC to the device with WiFi.

It makes your connection faster than connection via central WLAN network. Then, do the following steps:

1. Open ES File Explorer


2. Go to Network → Remote Manager


3. Press "Turn on" button


4. In Linux (I use Ubuntu), open its file manager


5. Click "Connect to Server" in the file manager left side


6. Enter the address of your device has appeared in ES File Explorer

(ftp://...:...).

Now, you can treat with your device like a drive in your PC.

Try this command, and restart, it worked for me.

sudo apt-get install libmtp-common mtp-tools libmtp-dev libmtp-runtime libmtp9

I was able to use rsync to get my files over from my HTC phone. The commands were:

$ mkdir HTC_Dump
$ cd HTC_Dump
$ rsync -av /run/user/1000/gvfs/mtp:host=%5Busb%3A002%2C010%5D/ ./

Resulting in:

sent 12,947,428,344 bytes received 38,549 bytes 9,738,598.64
bytes/sec
total size is 12,944,119,635 speedup is 1.00

I found the phone files location by looking in my /run directory.

This was on Xubuntu 17.10, Artful Aardvark, the Android was on an HTC running Android version 7.0.

A sdcard is normaly an exfat file system, which is by default not recognized by Ubuntu by default (I do not know if this is the case with other distrubitions).
To make my Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to be able to write to an exfat file system I did:

 sudo apt-get install exfat-fuse exfat-utils

Now I can just plugin my Android phone on my Ubuntu desktop with USB and copy files to my sdcard (64GB).