Welcome to my world... My wife is the same, she insists on an iPhone. I hate iOS, but love MacOS, so I have an iMac and a couple of MacBooks.
Recently, she asked me to get her photos off the iPhone, and get them backed up into our Dropbox account. Should be simple, yes?
I plugged the iPhone into the iMac under her account. But there doesn't seem to be any way of just copying/pasting the photos. The only way to sync seems to be to copy everything to iPhoto - which is not what I wanted. On my Android, I just drill down to the photos directory on the phone, and copy/paste into the Dropbox folder.
After doing a bit of googling, I found a utility that I had to install that allowed me to do it. But, that shouldn't be necessary.