Zack Shapiro

Save Your Memories: How to Extract Photos from iPhone Backup Files

Photos are a funny thing. On one hand, they’re how we remember our lives. No one wants a photo-less life to look back on. On the other hand, we’re terrible at saving our photos when we sync our phones with our computers. 

Let’s say you just restored your iPhone but forgot to pull the photos off and put them neatly into iPhoto before you restored, you just did it on an impulse.

Before you restored, iTunes made a backup of every file on your iPhone. That’s good. Now how do we crack it?

1. First, download the iPhone/iPod Touch Backup Extractor for your Mac.
2. Next, open the Backup Extractor and click the Read Backups button. This will create a new window that lays over the previous window with a list of iPhone backup files that are living on your harddrive.
3. Find the date of the most recent backup that you want to pull photos from. Select the backup and click Choose.
4. Next, scroll all the way to the bottom of the list of items and select iOS Files. That’s where all of your photos are. Click Extract and choose the folder that you want to save a new folder to, also called “iOS Files.”
5. Find the new iOS Files folder that you just extracted, open it and click the folder called “media.” Open the folder called DCIM and the subsequent folder inside. 

Bingo! You’ve unlocked your photos from your backup. Select the ones you want to save, drag them into iPhone or upload them to Flickr or Facebook and you’ve just saved some of your precious memories.