need urgent photo recovery help

[USMAMyer]

hello all, the short story of my issue here is that my mother passed a few days ago and my father asked me to recover the picture he cropped of her and used as his background on his iphone 3gs. I jailbroke the phone and am searching the root folders, i have found the wallpapers section but all of the pictures simply display as black boxes and nothing else although they look fine on the phone.

- I have loaded the newest Absinthe break following the instruction to the tee
- I am using iExplorer on my pc to search the root folder because the picture obviously must exist in order to display the wallpaper
- I have been trying to search for it with a backup extractor to no avail
- I loaded afc2add
- Calling apple/att/local phone stores (which i knew would be useless in the first place) yielded no useful answers

Basically any suggestions someone can offer are worth it as this picture is priceless and absolutely must come off the phone.
I have an old 3gs im using with a backup of the original phone so i can try anything without losing the photo for good. right now im trying to find a good way to remove the clock/slider and simply take a screenshot of it and go from there, but would rather figure out how to access the original as well. I am attempting to make this happen before funeral services friday the 14th (tomorrow) but if i cannot still have to recover the picture for my fathers sake.

Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance - Dan

 

[willerz2]

Sorry for your loss. If you haven't already, get OpenSSH on the iPhone, then download an FTP for your computer (WinSCP for Windows). Type in your iPhone's data iPhone (can be found on SBSettings Data IP or in your Settings -> WiFi). The username is 'root' the password is 'alpine' (default for all iDevices, used for both Windows and Mac). Once you're in, find '/User/Media/DCIM/100APPLE' or look in the '/User/Media/' directory. Just copy and paste it out.

 

[USMAMyer]

I can't thank you enough for this, I was able to get a screenshot after disabling the clock and thought that was the best I'd do. My dad flipped when I showed him the original thank you so much.

 

[illmatic636]

I can't thank you enough for this, I was able to get a screenshot after disabling the clock and thought that was the best I'd do. My dad flipped when I showed him the original thank you so much.

If you backed up the original in iTunes you can recover it and I'll tell you how:


From the computer that iTunes is in go to \Documents and Settings\user(or whatever login info is there for you)\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\ Click on the folder that has been modified most recently. You can tell by hoovering the mouse over the folder for a short period of time. There are a bunch of files in there that are named various characters. The files that are about 3000 mb are your pics. select a bunch and put them in a new folder on your desktop. rename each one and save them as a .jpg. You should be able to view them at this point. One by one and you will find your photo. It's there. Good luck.

 

[willerz2]

If you backed up the original in iTunes you can recover it and I'll tell you how:


From the computer that iTunes is in go to \Documents and Settings\user(or whatever login info is there for you)\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\ Click on the folder that has been modified most recently. You can tell by hoovering the mouse over the folder for a short period of time. There are a bunch of files in there that are named various characters. The files that are about 3000 mb are your pics. select a bunch and put them in a new folder on your desktop. rename each one and save them as a .jpg. You should be able to view them at this point. One by one and you will find your photo. It's there. Good luck.

I was thinking the same thing too, but from my experience on my iPhone, if you've never synced photos with your iPhone and iTunes (I almost never take pictures on my iPhone), then you can't back up your pictures entirely because if you sync it AFTER you take the pictures for the first time, it'll sync the designated folder to your iPhone but not from your iPhone to your iTunes. iCloud is handy in this case but WinSCP/iExplorer gets rid of any middleman problems