About
The SMS Backup & Restore app on Google Play (official name: com.riteshsahu.SMSBackupRestore) has the option of storing images from MMS messages as part of the backup. I wrote an extremely simple Python script that allows you to easily extract the images out of these backups.
Details
The app saves backups of your SMS messages, images included, in an xml file that looks like sms-<timestamp>.xml. The images that were stored as MMS messages are then encoded as Base64.
All this script does is search XML files for MMS messages, then decode the data from them to convert to regular images.
Usage
Prerequisites
- Python 3 (tested on Python 3.10.4)
- LXML
Steps
- Make sure the SMS backups files start with
sms-, have the.xmlextension, and are in their own directory - Create an output directory, where media files will be saved
- Run
$ python3 sms_backups_media_extractor.py --input-dir=<directory-where-sms-files-are> --output-dir=<directory-where-you-want-files-to-be-saved-to>
Output info
If the metadata of the MMS message included a filename, then that will be used for the output, otherwise a random 10-letter filename will be created. At the end, duplicates will be removed.
Limitations
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The image portions of the backup don't contain date information associated with them, so it's impossible to determine when an image was created (unless that information is in the filename).
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Some files will be created without extensions.
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EXIF data is lost when restoring images.
The backups I had only contained image data, not audio or videos. I don't know if that's because there were no video sent, or because the app didn't backup messages with audio or videos in them.