Downloading photos from a (USB-connected) iPhone programmatically

I'm wondering if it's possible to access the Camera Roll on the iPhone programmatically. Some background: I want to basically run a cron job every night that will download all the (preferably new since last time) photos from my iPho开发者_JS百科ne to a folder on my computer. I'm using a Mac, and I'm not terrifically concerned with interoperability — I suspect doing this in a platform-agnostic way is probably a lot more trouble than it's worth (if it's even possible).

Basically the only requirement here is that the program/script needs to be able to be invoked from the shell, which essentially everything can, so really I don't care what language it is in. Once the photos are downloaded I intend to run a Python script of mine to do what I will with them.

I suspect the easiest way to do this may be with (deep breath) AppleScript to the Image Capture application on every Mac. But maybe others have better ideas, or any experience with using the AppleScript approach?

---

You can use the ImageCaptureCore framework to download photos over PTP.

---

I guess the easiest and most comfortable solution would be to use Automator for that, using the "Download Pictures" action in a workflow and invoking it from a shell using "automator".