Warning - Lightroom running in the background can kill MTP connections

Johnmcl7

This might not affect anyone but after getting rather frustrated with this issue I thought I'd post any way in case it does help anyone.  I connected my Android phone to my PC to copy photos over using MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) as I've done regularly without issue but this time I couldn't get it working, when transferring individual pictures it would transfer a tiny 12k version of it and when transferring bulk photos it would hang trying to transfer a single file eventually timing out with a helpful error 'the requested value cannot be determined'.

I couldn't find anything helpful online so gave up and decided to just use the Samsung software for now but when it was misbehaving I started to get suspicious, Lightroom had been open when I connected the phone and had popped up the import dialogue which I cancelled letting it go back to the develop screen.  I tried closing Lightroom entirely and the MTP problems promptly disappeared and I had no problems copying bulk photos as normal, it seems Lightroom was holding the connection open to the phone itself and preventing anything else transferring data using that interface.