I can no longer see the photos on my iPhone when I plug it into my laptop like it’s a USB drive with that cord that powers the phone on one end and has a USB port on the other.

Instead, I just see an empty drive called "Internal Storage." This is all new as of the upgrade to iOS 8.1.3 (12B466). Wait, not true... I can see the photos if I go into the photos at the iPhone and answer yes to a question about whether I want to allow my computer to have access. Whew! I cannot however, not drag a drop photos into the folders of photos it seems. This seems to be a change up, I think. I've done some Googling as to how to use the iPhone like a USB drive but in everything I've seen I have to go into iTunes to make it happen and I don't even want to think about iTunes.