Browse files (including SQLite databases) on your iPhone with ifuse#

I spotted an intriguing note in the release notes for osxphotos 0.51.7:

Added ability to read Photos.sqlite from iPhone

This lead me to osxphotos issue #745 which lead me to How to access iPhone files with a disk mount which lead me to ifuse and homebrew-fuse .

Here’s what worked for me.

Connect the iPhone to a Mac using a USB-C to Lightning cable
Find the serial number of your iPhone, by running system_profiler SPUSBDataType -detailLevel mini | grep -e iPhone -e Serial and looking for the first number. It will look something like 00008110001631C105BA801E.
Add a hyphen to that serial number after the 8th character: 00008110-001631C105BA801E - you will need this later
brew install macfuse
brew install gromgit/fuse/ifuse-mac
A tricky bit: this has installed an unsigned binary, which macOS really doesn’t want to execute. So…
mkdir /tmp/iPhone
ifuse /tmp/iPhone --udid 00008110-001631C105BA801E - using the serial number you figured out earlier
This should fail with an error complaining about the unsigned binary
Open System Preferences -> Security & Privacy and allow that binary to run. You may then need to restart your computer.
After the reboot, mkdir /tmp/iPhone again.
Now try ifuse /tmp/iPhone --udid 00008110-001631C105BA801E again - this time it should work

If everything goes right, you can run open /tmp/iPhone to open a Finder window showing at least some of the contents of your phone. You can also cd /tmp/iPhone to start poking around from the terminal.

Finding SQLite databases#

The easiest way to find SQLite databases to explore is to run:

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find /tmp/iPhone | grep 'wal'

This searches for files with names like downloads.28.sqlitedb-wal - which indicate a SQLite database that has been opened in WAL mode.

On my iPhone I get these:

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/tmp/iPhone/Downloads/downloads.28.sqlitedb-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/Books/MetadataStore/BookMetadataStore.sqlite-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/Books/Sync/Database/OutstandingAssets_4.sqlite-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/Radio/Radio.db-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/iTunes_Control/iTunes/MediaLibrary.sqlitedb-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/MediaAnalysis/mediaanalysis.db-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/PhotoData/Caches/GraphService/CLSBusinessCategoryCache.Nature.sqlite-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/PhotoData/Caches/GraphService/CLSContactCache.sqlite-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/PhotoData/Caches/GraphService/musiccache.sqlite-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/PhotoData/Caches/GraphService/CLSLocationCache.sqlite-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/PhotoData/Caches/GraphService/CLSPublicEventCache.sqlite-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/PhotoData/Caches/GraphService/PhotosGraph/construction-photosgraph.kgdb-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/PhotoData/Caches/GraphService/PhotosGraph/photosgraph-tmp.kgdb-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/PhotoData/Caches/GraphService/PhotosGraph/photosgraph.kgdb-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/PhotoData/Caches/GraphService/CLSBusinessCategoryCache.POI.sqlite-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/PhotoData/Caches/GraphService/CLSBusinessCategoryCache.ROI.sqlite-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/PhotoData/Caches/GraphService/PGCurationCache.sqlite.sqlite-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/PhotoData/Caches/GraphService/CLSBusinessCategoryCache.AOI.sqlite-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/PhotoData/Caches/search/psi.sqlite-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/PhotoData/CPL/storage/store.cloudphotodb-wal
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/tmp/iPhone/PhotoData/Photos.sqlite-wal

You can then open them in Datasette by specifying the filename without the -wal extension. For example:

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datasette /tmp/iPhone/Radio/Radio.db