How do I access MTP devices on the command line in Windows?

Question

Most MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) devices show up in Windows File Explorer under their device name or a GUID, but they don't have a drive letter assigned.

How can I access the files on such devices from the command line? Using either cmd.exe or PowerShell.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, APIs exposed by MTP are very different from a normal filesystem APIs. Therefore exposing MTP device as a read/write filesystem is not possible. The main reason:

Wikipedia says:

Neither the MTP nor the PTP standards allow for direct modification of objects. Instead, modified objects must be reuploaded in their entirety, which can take a long time for large objects. With PTP/MTP, the file size must be known at the opening stage.

Your common file copy program just opens a source and a target file, and copies data in chunks from the source file to the target. This won't work with MTP, since you need to use MTP special functions, and generic filesystem primitives (read, seek, write) are not available.

There are also other limitations. For example, the number of files that can be read or written simultaneously on an MTP device is severely limited. The device simply does not behave like a filesystem.

I suppose read-only filesystem driver for an MTP device might be possible, but because of the problems outlined above, it will be of very little use, so nobody bothered to create it.

Answer 2

There is a proprietary (but still nice) program: MTP Drive (https://www.mtpdrive.com/) which allows you to "mount" MTP devices as drives in Windows. With some reasonable limitations it does the great job!

Answer 3

I've had success mounting a Garmin Descent Mk2i (to use with SubSurface Dive Log) using MTPMount (an open source project) Release 9.18.0 on Windows 10.

This has a dependency on installing Dokan (Dokany 1.5.1.1000) which exposes a FUSE filesystem to Windows apps.

NOTE 1: At the current time, the latest release (19.8.0, linked above) of MTPMount has not been updated to work with the latest v2.x Dokan, you need to use the 1.5.1.1000 Dokany Release

NOTE 2: MTPMount is a command line app and does not make it obvious what you have to type.
After a few minutes of failed attempts I found the following worked for me.

.\mtpmount-x64.exe mount "Descent Mk2i" "Primary"

Answer 4

You may be able to cobble something together with the MTP porting kit's MTPMon.

Alternatively, PowerShell can create COM objects and call their methods, so you may be able to use the APIs that Windows Explorer is using (for example, GetDeviceInfo() and GetObjectInfo()).

Answer 5

If it's true that Android phones use MTP to connect to pc's when in "File transfer" mode, than PowerShell is a solution, I just answered this on StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/a/75543733/3090890

Slightly edited copy of my answer on StackOverflow below.

I found this PowerShell script: https://github.com/nosalan/powershell-mtp-file-transfer/ Disclaimer: I'm not the author of the script, so credits belong to him! Just for this answer, I copied and pasted code snippets from the linked source to provide it with some explanation.

The trick to access the phone, which should be in "File transfer" mode when connected through USB, is in this part:

$phoneName = "Nokia 7.2"    
$o = New-Object -com Shell.Application
$rootComputerDirectory = $o.NameSpace(0x11)
$phoneDirectory = $rootComputerDirectory.Items() | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq $phoneName} | select -First 1

Then you are able to traverse to the directory you want:

$sourceFolder = $phoneDirectory
$phoneFolderName = "Internal shared storage\DCIM\Camera"
foreach($pathSegment in ($phoneFolderName -split "\\"))
{
    $sourceFolder = $sourceFolder.GetFolder.Items() | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq $pathSegment} | select -First 1
    if($sourceFolder -eq $null)
    {
      throw "Not found $phoneFolderName folder"
    }
}

And finally copy items from the reached sourceFolder to the destination:

function Get-FullPathOfMtpDir($mtpDir)
{
    $fullDirPath = ""
    $directory = $mtpDir.GetFolder
    while($directory -ne $null)
    {
        $fullDirPath =  -join($directory.Title, '\', $fullDirPath)
        $directory = $directory.ParentFolder;
    }
    return $fullDirPath
}
$targetFolder = "E:\Test"
$destDirShell = (new-object -com Shell.Application).NameSpace($targetFolder)
$fullSourceDirPath = Get-FullPathOfMtpDir $sourceFolder 
foreach ($item in $sourceFolder.GetFolder.Items())
{
    $itemName = ($item.Name)
    $fullFilePath = Join-Path -Path $targetFolder -ChildPath $itemName

    if(Test-Path $fullFilePath)
    {
        Write-Host "Element '$itemName' already exists"
    }
    else
    {
        $copiedCount++;
        Write-Host ("Copying #{0}: {1}{2}" -f $copiedCount, $fullSourceDirPath, $item.Name)
        $destDirShell.CopyHere($item)
    }
}
Write-Host "Copied '$copiedCount' elements from '$fullSourceDirPath'"

It's also possible to copy files back to the phone. Here I swap the target and source as example, and copy "E:\Test\atestfileonpc.txt" to the phone's "DCIM\Camera" folder:

$sourceDirShell = (new-object -com Shell.Application).NameSpace($targetFolder)
$targetDirShell = $sourceFolder
$item = $sourceDirShell.Items() | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq "atestfileonpc.txt"} | select -First 1
targetDirShell.GetFolder.CopyHere($item)