It’s relatively easy to grab photos from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch just by plugging it into your computer, whether you have iTunes installed or not. But if you want to access other media folders, you typically need to use third party tools. Phone Disk from Macroplant might be one of the best I’ve seen… and if you download and register the app between now and December 1st, it’s available as a free download.
Here’s how it works. You install Phone Disk on your Windows or Mac computer and the app runs in the background. When you plug in your iOS device, it will automatically be mounted as a disk drive, showing up in you Finder or Windows Explorer.
Phone Disk doesn’t give you access to every file stored on your device. For that, you’ll still need to jailbreak your device. But Phone Disk will give you access to your media folders including books, camera, photos, podcasts, downloads, purchases, recordings, and other items. You can also use the tool to simply use your iPhone as a USB mass storage device and copy files to your phone to carry with you — even though those files may not be accessible in your iOS apps.
Phone Disk works with multiple devices, so if you have an iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad you can plug them into your computer at the same time and they’ll show up as three separate drives.
The program supports OS X 10.5 and up and Windows XP and up. You’ll need to have iTunes 8 or later installed and if you’r eon a Mac, you’ll need a machine with an Intel processor.
You can check out a few more screenshots after the break.
