"Photo Import" alert remains even if camera is disconnected

You need to justify why adding this autoclose functionality is useful. Seems like it could be annoying with multiple cameras, and doesn't add much. I suggest you take your case directly to the gthumb developers by report a bug here:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=gthumb
If you do that please link this one to your new bug.

Thank you for reporting the bug and helping make Ubuntu better. On looking into it further I determined that this is how nautilus works (so there is some precedent). Will see about forwarding it upstream, but first could you answer me these two things:
What happens if you are in the middle of a transfer and the camera is unplugged in gThumb?
What happens if you are in the middle of a transfer and the camera is unplugged in nautilus?

Bryan, I don't see what either of those questions have to do with this bug. Could you explain? And if they are relevant, are you asking me to test what happens currently, or to describe what should happen? Thanks.

I think they are relevant (and I am just using nautilus as something to see similar functionality with, you can replace that with anything else that copies files/ views stuff on removable drives):

Your scenario:
User inserts camera
Importer Comes up
User Removes camera
Importer doesn't go away (but you want it too)

In fixing that, we might want to consider the exception case:
User inserts camera
Importer Comes Up
User Begins Import
User Removes Camera (before import is complete)
???? - Importer goes away?

I was wondering what nautilus and gThumb both do in that situation and what you think is the best thing for them to do.

I think that's a very different situation. If a camera disconnects (or, more likely, runs out of battery) in the middle of an import, that's probably an accident and should result in an error message that gives you a chance to resume (which would be a separate bug). This bug report is about something much simpler: Ubuntu should not offer to do the impossible, i.e. import photos from a camera that isn't connected.