June 19, 2009 

Transfer Camera Roll from your old Iphone 2G/3G to 3GS

Hey all just a quick post.

If you want to keep your photos in your camera roll you should be able to do it using iPhoneBrowser for the pc.

Disclaimer: This shouldn’t cause any problems but do so at your own risk, if you screw your file system on your phone you might have to restore. I dont take responsibility if you break it.

Make sure you have Itunes 8.2 installed and you have the latest version of iphonebrowser software installed. (Currently 1.91)

Plug in your iphone 3g, and open the iphonebrowser software and navigate to the camera roll folder Which is in \Root\DCIM\100Apple (See Below)

1

Select all the pictures in this folder and right click them and click save as and make a folder (on the desktop for arguments sake) to copy your pictures to.

Once this has finished you should also go into the MISC folder and backup all the .THM and .BHT into another folder.

(Im not sure what the bth files are, but im guessing the THM are the square thumbnails we all know and love)

Now plug in your shiny new 3GS and navigate down to the Root\DCIM\100Apple folder then you should be able to select all your pictures you saved in the folder on your desktop and drag right into the iphonebrowser program which will copy them back. Repeat this process to copy all the .THM and BTH files back into the misc directory.

I have just successfully use this method to backup pictures on my iPhone 3g delete them from the handset and followed the above instructions to restore them.

I dont have a 3GS so let me know if there are any problems but it should work fine.


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  • Dave Clarke

    Awesome!!! I can confirm that this works 100% flawlessly. I copied photos from my 3G to 3G S without a problem. Thanks!

  • martin

    how can i rebuild the .thm and .bth files? i only have the .jpg files….

  • http://www.funys.net Ben

    I don’t know off the top of my head I will try and find out and post back here and will email you if the one you filled in is valid. Thanks.

  • http://www.funys.net Ben

    right it looks like the .thm files are just 75×75 jpgs of the pictures in your list. not sure about the .bth.

    One thing you could do is to sync the folder of pics on your computer in itunes to your iphone, this would not put them back into the camera roll though, they would be in a seperate album.

    If you sync these pictures over you might be able to copy them back to the camera roll if you have jailbroken your phone, i understand that this enables root access. I checked with iphonebrowser and it will not show the location of seperatly sync’d albums but im guessing as it does this it builds the .thm and .bth files required for the thumbnails.

  • http://www.funys.net Ben

    actually it looks like the camera roll app is still showing the pic after deleting its associated .bth file.

    This means that you could get a batch image resize a copy of all of your images to 75×75 then give them all a .thm extension and use these as thumbnails, they might not be as pretty but might work.

  • Irha

    Knew about the THM files, but didn’t realize the sub directory. I actually tried to transfer them from a 2G iphone with 1.1.4 firmware. Since 1.1.4 had the .THM files in the same directory, it didn’t work when I copied them the same way. Thanks to your post, I noticed that the THM files should be in the subdirectory.

    BTW, I don’t see a /DCIM directory, for me the path is /private/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/100APPLE in both 1.1.4 and 3.0 firmwares. Looking at the list of files in your pictures, it looks like for you the /private/var/mobile/Media directory appears as the root. Wondering why.

  • http://www.funys.net Ben

    I think it’s because I’m not jailbroken, iirc on 2.2.1 it showed a similar path to what you are talking about. I’m hoping to try and jb this week if I can get it to work. Redsn0w just won’t get on with some versions of vista it seems, so might try with my xp box at work.

    Glad it helped :)

  • bubbafrombama

    The only problem with this method is that it puts all the pictures out of order back onto the new phone (i.e. 3GS).

  • Jeremy

    Hey this is great will this also work if I wanted to back up texts or calanders?

  • http://www.funys.net Ben

    THanks for you kind words.

    The best bet for you calendar is to use itunes to sync with your email client then do the same to go back. As far as sms goes it gets backed up by a full bacukp but if you move from a 3g to a 3gs this wont work, im sure i read somewhere about a jailbreak app that will do it. I’ll see if i can track something down and post back here.

    Thanks

    Ben

  • http://www.funys.net Ben

    Its looks like there is an app called isafecopy that will do it, there is a 30 day trial or $5 registration. You’d need to jailbreak your existing device do the backup and then jailbreak the new device, restore the backup then run an itunes backup of your 3gs and then run a restore (which then restores your backup, without jailbreak but should have your messages. Of course if you want to stay jailbroken then thats fine but not everybody does.

    I havent used this app so cant garuntee it will work but have read good things via google

  • Kevil

    This is ace! Thank you. I’ve transfered photos, and voice memos from a 3G to 3GS no problems.

  • http://www.goldschmidt.co.za AndrewGoldy

    Hi Guys,

    I tried to do the same thing, but forgot about the .MISC folder and the THM & BTH files…

    So, now I don't have any thumbnails! Doh!

    I have tried everything, including messing with the permissions.

    It looks like the THM & BTH files are created when you take a picture only.

    Maybe no luck for us then!

  • http://www.funys.net Ben Gillam

    i havent tested this but if you were to set up a folder in itunes to sync with your phone for pictures, does it then generate .thm files when you look on the phone? these could then be manually put back onto the camera roll. i'll try and test it if i get a minute tonight.

    When you say you forgot, have you wiped/deleted the old phone now?