iMazing is a very powerful app, but I’m going to focus mostly on how it solved this one problem. Before I start on the solution, though, let\u2019s talk briefly about its overall capabilities and the company’s license model. With iMazing, you can:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Schedule local backups with snapshots<\/li>\n
- Back up to custom locations such as external drives<\/li>\n
- Export messages with metadata<\/li>\n
- Copy music and videos from and to<\/em> your iOS devices<\/li>\n
- Manage files on your iOS device just as though it\u2019s an external drive<\/li>\n
- Manage configuration profiles<\/li>\n
- Store no-longer-supported iOS apps and reinstall them on a new device<\/li>\n
- And a whole lot more<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
All of the transfers of data and backups are local on your machine, never sending any of the data to someone else\u2019s cloud service.<\/p>\n
![\"IMazing](\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/iMazing-feature-list.png\" "\\"iMazing")
iMazing Feature List<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n Their license model is interesting. It\u2019s a subscription for $60\/year that allows you to install on any number of Macs and Windows machines, but you’re limited to accessing just five iOS devices. They are very clear when you sign up that you\u2019ll be renewed in one year, and I interpreted that as, \u201cdon\u2019t forget to cancel.\u201d Since I only needed the application for this one task, I paid the $60 and immediately cancelled the subscription. I still get to use it for a year, and if I end up liking some of the other features, I can always renew when it comes close to its expiration date, but at least it won’t auto-renew. I looked at it as a one-time payment of $60 to extract information from her phone.<\/p>\n
There are some features that are available without paying for the subscription, but I was unable to find a comparison list between free and paid. For example, I believe you can run backups locally without paying, but don\u2019t hold me to that.<\/p>\n
Working with My Niece\u2019s Phone<\/h2>\n
Now let\u2019s get into the specific problem to be solved with my niece\u2019s phone. One of iMazing’s superpowers is that it can extract everything from an iOS device, either as a backup or in a more human-readable format.<\/p>\n
I plugged in her phone and got a very pretty interface in iMazing. On the Overview tab, I could see lots of information about her device, down to the serial number, and an explanation of her storage use by category (photos, audio, books, etc.) Across the top was a row of buttons for photos, music, messages, and more. From these buttons, you can directly access the apps on the phone and either export data from the phone or import data to the phone. For example, if you choose Photos, you can see the entire Photos library, including all albums and media types, and export or import photos and videos.<\/p>\n
![\"IMazing](\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/iMazing-interface-looking-at-her-phone.png\" "\\"iMazing")
iMazing Interface<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n Down the right side was a list of Quick Actions, such as Quick Transfer, Back Up, and Manage Apps. My first instinct was to run a backup. While that seemed like a good idea, after it completed the backups, I realized it wasn’t a format that allowed us to access the contents. Not the worst thing in the world to have, but not the final solution.<\/p>\n
The next option I tried was Export All Data, and that was where things got really interesting. I got a list of categories I could choose to export. I disabled the options for impersonal things like books and music, and let it run the export on the rest of the categories.<\/p>\n
When complete, I had folders for:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Calendars<\/li>\n
- Contacts<\/li>\n
- Messages<\/li>\n
- Notes<\/li>\n
- Photos<\/li>\n
- Voicemail<\/li>\n
- WhatsApp<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
I’d like to talk through the value of each of these folders and how they’re structured.<\/p>\n
Calendars<\/h3>\n
The Calendars folder contained several sub-folders: iCloud, Other, Reminders, and Subscribed Calendars. Inside each of those folders were more subfolders. For example, inside iCloud, I found Calendar, Home, and Work. I imagine every named folder would be a separate subfolder in here.<\/p>\n
Drilling down into any of these named calendar subfolders reveals three different file types that are an export of that calendar. You get a comma-separated values format (.csv), an Excel file (.xlsx), and a .ics file, which you could import into another calendar application.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not sure the calendar events in a list will provide her parents with any comfort, but it will allow them to walk through her life over the decade or so she had her phone.<\/p>\n
Contacts<\/h3>\n
Contacts worked pretty similarly to Calendars. There were subfolders for All contacts, iCloud, and Unknown, and subfolders within them. Drilling down all the way revealed .csv and .xlsx files with all of her contacts\u2019 information, which could be useful to her parents. It also included a .vcf file, which can be imported into another contacts application. I hadn’t ever heard of it before, but .vcf is to contacts what .ics is to calendars.<\/p>\n
Messages<\/h3>\n
Messages are definitely an area where they may get insights into her life, but it\u2019s also so massive that it might not be super useful. Messages also have subfolders, and each subfolder is a conversation with a different person or group of people. The folders\u2019 names start with the date, which is nice for sorting, followed by a time stamp, and then some word or words to identify the conversation. I can\u2019t quite figure out how the name is created, but it does help to identify the conversation.<\/p>\n
I couldn’t resist the temptation to peek inside the conversation folder entitled, \u201cF.A.R.T\u201d. To my great chagrin, it was a work conversation that had zero information on flatulence; it was a work thread!<\/p>\n
Inside each message thread folder, you get several interesting ways to understand the message. Probably the most useful is a PDF that has the entire conversation, formatted just like a Message thread with little text bubbles and embedded thumbnails of any images. You also get a plain text file that has just the messages, with time stamps and who the message was from, along with their phone number. There are even Excel and CSV versions of the same information.<\/p>\n
But perhaps of most interest to her parents is that every single image, video, and GIF that was in the message thread is also in this same folder, in full size.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll get back to this in a bit, but think about drilling down into each of these folders one by one to see if any of the photos are interesting and ones you\u2019d like to keep. She had 1082 separate Message conversations saved on her phone, so 1082 separate folders to drill down into one-by-one to see the images. I needed to find a solution to make this easier for them.<\/p>\n
Notes<\/h3>\n
The Notes folder is probably the simplest. It simply contains plain text files for each note, and if there were any embedded images, they\u2019re in a folder with the same title, sorted next to the text file.<\/p>\n
Photos<\/h3>\n
The Photos folder contains separate folders of photos and videos for every day there was a media file captured. If you thought Messages would be annoying to go through, the export from her phone had 5,823 folders containing images and videos. Again, this is untenable as a way to view photos, so this one needs a solution too.<\/p>\n
Voicemail<\/h3>\n
My niece kept a lot of voicemails. At first, her parents were pleased they’d be able to hear these, but then they realized it wouldn\u2019t be hearing her voice; it would be the voice of others leaving voicemails for her. They\u2019re not buried in folders; they\u2019re simply in order by date and time, with the name of who left the messages. The recordings are .amr files, which is a compressed audio format called Adaptive Multi-Rate and easily playable with QuickTime.<\/p>\n
WhatsApp<\/h3>\n
Finally, she has a WhatsApp folder. I imagine you\u2019d have one for whatever messaging apps you use. Like Apple Messages, her WhatsApp folder had subfolders containing a PDF, and the three text formats: .csv, .txt, and .xlsx.<\/p>\n
As it turned out, she wasn\u2019t a big WhatsApp user, so there weren\u2019t any photos in that folder.<\/p>\n
This Calls for a Script<\/h2>\n
Now that we understand the folder structure, let’s talk about how to reorganize both the Photos and Messages folders to make it easier for them to comb through the image and video files. Remember, there are literally thousands of folders with buried images and videos.<\/p>\n
As much as I love this family, I wasn\u2019t willing to do any of it by hand, but instead decided to write a script to reorganize the data.<\/p>\n
But first, I had to do some reorganization on my own laptop, because I’d made one strategic error. I\u2019d downloaded not just the backup, but also the folder structure export to my Desktop \u2026 and I sync Documents and Desktop through iCloud! I didn\u2019t check the backup size before tossing it, but the export alone was around 30GB. Have you noticed It\u2019s actually hard nowadays to find a place on your Mac that isn\u2019t<\/em> synced through some service? I settled on my Downloads folder, which isn\u2019t synced.<\/p>\n
Goal of the Script<\/h3>\n
The goal of my script was to move all of the photos and videos into just two folders: one for the Photos app and one for her Messages app. I wanted them copied to those two folders without any of the subfolder structure, and I wanted the original capture dates of the images to be maintained so they would sort properly.<\/p>\n
I used that goal as a prompt in Perplexity to help me write a shell script that would work on macOS 26. The resulting script was only 29 lines long. In my original prompt, I forgot to tell it to preserve the original capture dates, but it added that step without me asking. It also added file extensions to look for, well beyond what I would have thought of if I’d been specific. For example, it included tiff, avi, and mkv. It also put in a step to check if a file of the same name already existed, and if so, it would add a counter to the file name.<\/p>\n
#!\/bin\/zsh\n\nsrc=\"\/path\/to\/source-root\"\ndest=\"\/path\/to\/flat-media\"\n\nmkdir -p \"$dest\"\n\n# Adjust extensions to taste\nextensions=(\n jpg jpeg png gif heic tiff tif\n mp4 mov m4v avi mkv hevc\n)\n\nfor ext in $extensions; do\n find \"$src\" -type f -iname \"*.$ext\" -print0 |\n while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do\n base=$(basename \"$file\")\n # If a file with same name already exists, prefix with a counter\n if [[ -e \"$dest\/$base\" ]]; then\n i=1\n while [[ -e \"$dest\/${i}_$base\" ]]; do\n ((i++))\n done\n cp -p \"$file\" \"$dest\/${i}_$base\"\n else\n cp -p \"$file\" \"$dest\/$base\"\n fi\n done\ndone\n<\/code><\/pre>\nI put the teeny script into the shownotes if you’re interested in reading it. While I understood the basic gist of what the script was going to do, I’ll confess that I didn\u2019t break down every command to understand every element. Since I\u2019m not an idiot, I created a couple of test directories with sample data from her phone and ran the script on that data first to see if it worked properly. After I ran the script on the test data, I checked to ensure that all of the images copied over to the destination directory as individual files without folders, and I double-checked that the file creation dates had been preserved.<\/p>\n
Once satisfied that it was working properly and not destroying the original source data, I ran it on the Photos folder export from iMazing, and it copied 35,000 photos and videos in short order.<\/p>\n
It was easy to modify the script to run again on the Messages folder because Perplexity wrote the script with a variable at the beginning for the source and destination directories, and it would create the destination directory for me. I only had to switch the source to Messages, name a new destination, and it moved over another 12,000 photos and videos to the second directory.<\/p>\n
When I was done, I had two flat directories filled with images they could easily flip through, delete the ones they didn’t want, and save the precious memories that would give them comfort. I have to say I was rather chuffed after this success.<\/p>\n
Interlude \u2014 Upgrading Macs to macOS Tahoe<\/h2>\n
Now it was time to move the files to her mother\u2019s Mac. Like most of you, when Steve and I go to see family, we expect to do a lot of tech support. Steve\u2019s parents are diligent about applying security updates to their devices, but we like to be the ones to do major OS upgrades just in case something goes wonky, or they have trouble understanding a new interface. We planned to install Tahoe on both of their Macs over the holiday.<\/p>\n
In the past, we\u2019ve both downloaded the installer from System Settings while at his parents’ home, which meant we were competing for bandwidth on the same network. This year, I decided to make a couple of bootable installers before we left home to speed things up when we arrived at their home.<\/p>\n
I formatted two SSDs as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and followed Apple\u2019s instructions on how to How to download and install macOS – Apple Support<\/a>. They really<\/em> want you to use the Mac App Store to download, but that only works if you\u2019re not downloading the current version of macOS. If you need the current version, you’ll be using the Terminal to do the download.<\/p>\n
![\"Show](\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/show-view-options-calculate-all-sizes.png\" "\\"show")