Moving pictures off of an iPhone

My son asked me to
move the pictures off of his iPhone onto an external hard drive I have. I
didn't think it would be that big of a deal, so I said sure. However, I
connected it with the cable I normally use to synchronize (I was planning to
browse to the pictures on his iPhone to a hard disc.

As I got started, I could
see this was not at all what I was expecting. Mainly, he has taken thousands of
pictures and the iPhone has separated them under many virtual drives - 22 in total.
None of those virtualdrives are labeled so it's difficult to determine easily which drives I've
copied.

Finally,
the iPhone automatically names the picture with four numbers after the letters "IMG”,
that means it only handles 1000 pictures. Since he has more than that, when I
put them into one directory, some don't get copied.

Is there an easier way I can handle this?