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At my workplace I have a detached building that sits in the middle of a scrapyard. As you can imagine it gets very dirty in that building. The users in that building don't need powerful desktops, they can get by with something like a thin client that RDPs into a terminal server. Since I already have thin clients in other locations at my workplace it won't be an issue setting them up.

My problem stems from the fact that those users need to transfer photos they take out in the scrapyard to a network location. Currently they transfer with a data cable plugged into their Windows desktops. Unfortunately the thin clients I hoped to put in don't recognize the iPhone as a storage device/pass that connection onto the RDP server to open up. (I would've really really liked to have gotten this working, but short of updating the underlying ubuntu distro the thin client OS sits on top of, this isn't going to happen)

What I'm looking for is an alternate way to let the users upload their photos without a full desktop being present. Here's what I've considered so far:

-Different thin clients: I currently support about thirty of these thin clients, if I considered purchasing new thin clients just for this purpose, I'd only need three and I'd only need them at that location. I'd rather not support a second set of thin clients just for three users

-Wireless transfer: There's three strikes against this method. The pictures are big, the user takes a lot of them at one time, and even if we did end up going this route any of the software I've seen (which hasn't been much I admit) seems too complicated for my users. They're scrapyard workers and not too technically inclined. Plus they're already used to just plugging in a cable and pulling files in somewhat quickly.

-Bluetooth: See the answer above and add on to that these thin clients don't come with bluetooth. I could get a receiver and test to see if that would work. Even if did work, it seems like the transfer speed would be comparable to wireless.

-Network connected USB hub: I would love to find one of these that would work with an iPhone, I have not found anything so far.

-Cheap digital cameras for the users and a usb card reader for the thin client: The users have gone through (i.e. broken) several digital cameras. They don't seem to break their company owned (or personal) iPhones for some reason.

More info:

-Most of my servers are 2008 R2, which is where the network folders these photos need to get added to reside on.

-The users iPhones are 5s or 5Ss.

Any suggestions are appreciated. Please let me know if my information on one of the considerations above is incorrect or you have a better solution I missed either in one of those categories or out of.

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  • Setup wifi. Install dropbox on iphone for completely automatic uploads, have something elsewhere that retrieves them from dropbox? Or owncloud. There are plenty of apps that can just automatically upload all photos. Wifi is probably about as fast as usb transfers anyways.
    – Grant
    Sep 24, 2015 at 21:39
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    Thin clients nowadays cost more than regular desktops. Use cheap devices (HP stream 13's can be found under $150) that run full windows and use the same policies you run on the thin clients
    – Jim B
    Sep 25, 2015 at 2:15
  • Jim B, I'm open to the idea of a small form factor, passively cooled desktop PC. If you use something that fits that description, let me know. The HP stream 13 isn't an option because it's a laptop. Sep 25, 2015 at 14:12
  • Grant, I like the idea but there's a few logistical issues. 1) Throwing it to dropbox adds another step in the process. If there was a program that had dropbox like automatic upload capability, but you could point it to a shared folder on network, I could use that. 2)Some of these iPhones are personal phones, so whatever solution I come up with needs to be able to selectively upload photos. 3) The software has to be as simple as possible. These users are not technically inclined in any sense of the word. Sep 25, 2015 at 14:18

1 Answer 1

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The optimal solution for me was using a program called "USB Redirector TS Edition" Homepage in combination with a thin client that runs Win 7 embedded. This allows me to plug an iPhone into a thin client and access it's internal storage after I'm RDP'd in.

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