I connected my action camera (GoPro Hero 5) to the computer running Ubuntu 16.10 LTS to download files. To my surprise, I did not see the camera's folder in /media/. Running find | grep DCIM from the root folder discovered a folder with the following path, which contained the video files I was looking for:
/run/user/1000/gvfs/gphoto2:host=%5Busb%3A003%2C094%5D/DCIM/
So, what is /run/user/1000/gvfs/ and how is its purpose different than /media/?
Ubuntu is based upon many things plus home-grown programming from Canonical (the owners of Ubuntu). Most people know it is based on Linux kernel and provides a "GNOME" Desktop environment. But it is also based on Debian and perhaps just as important Gnome Internals. It is so intrinsic I dare to say on Ubuntu that: "All roads lead to Gnome".
In your question, /run/user/1000/gvfs/ the gvfs component stands for "Gnome Virtual File System". Your camera and Android phones are mounted in this "User Space" outside of "Kernel Space" where a normal "mount" occurs.
To learn more about GIO (Gnome Input Output I surmise) see here and here. Ubuntu has a page about using GIO to mount devices using the gvfs-mount command.
The other component in your question /run/user/1000/gvfs/ is the /run/user component. This was created by systemd to circumvent using the /tmp directory which was common practice for such devices because it side-stepped network "rules". See here.
/media?The /media directory is where removable storage is located. The removable storage is in a familiar file format such as ext4, fat or ntfs. The device names and mount names are static.
Your Android phone is not just removable storage, but a removable foreign operating system that has storage. The storage is generally accessed with MTP. However, there is a host of programs to communicate with the phone. That is why it goes into /run/user/1000/gvfs. Samba also goes into the same directory chain, but I haven't researched that one yet.
In the /run/user/1000 directory structure the mount names are dynamic and change with every connection. For example, my phone currently is:
$ ll /run/user/1000/gvfs/mtp:host=%5Busb%3A001%2C013%5D
total 0
dr-x------ 1 rick rick 0 Dec 31 1969 ./
dr-x------ 3 rick rick 0 May 9 18:20 ../
drwx------ 1 rick rick 0 Dec 31 1969 Internal storage/
drwx------ 1 rick rick 0 Dec 31 1969 SD card/
The USB enumeration is notorious for changing, so you can be assured the directory name will be different next time. /media "stuff" on the other hand is static.
Notice the dates shown by Ubuntu 16.04 under Kernel 4.14.34. I haven't had this Android Smartphone since the year 1969. I guess we can call this a bug.
