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has to be unmounted before importing sounds a bit weird..!

Lots of applications (see gThumb with Martin Pitt's patch) want to
unmount cameras before proceeding but it's a mistake to me. Once
unmounting, it can't be accessible through Nautilus for instance.
Applications should not fight against the system so Nautilus and
Shotwell could be able to share the device.

Maybe you could look at phraymd (Python application) which succeed in
importing photos without unmounting the camera, which seems to be the
only way to proceed. For what i know i think that spillz (phraymd
developper) makes use of GVfs for that. Once he pointed out the GVfs
FUSE hack explained here :
http://davidz25.blogspot.com/2008/10/getting-gvfs-and-fuse-right.html,
adding : "Of course, the GVfs API provides higher level access than
what FUSE gives, so I will ultimately use that in phraymd."

Hope it can help.

Anyway, keep on the good work for that excellent application

Cheers,

Thibaut