Total Messages: 0 in Ventura VM

[nraygun]

Fired up a Ventura VM for my iPhone 15 Pro running iOS 18.1.1. I haven't used a Mac in a while and I see iTunes is gone but the backup function is built into Finder.
I hit back to my Mac and chose unencrypted. It appears to have backed up the phone.
But then imessage-exporter doesn't find anything. Looking in the Library/Messages folder, I see a chat.db but it's only 328KB. I'm pretty sure my chats are multiple gigabytes.
I ran the exporter with the -d parameter and see Total Messages: 0.

Any ideas? I'm sure I'm doing something wrong in macOS.

[ReagentX]

Its sounds like you are pointing imessage-exporter at the macOS iMessage database, not the root of your iOS backup. See the instructions for the -p flag here.

It is worth noting that you can backup using Apple Devices on Windows or libmobiledevice on Linux, you dont need a macOS VM to run imessage-exporter.

[nraygun]

I'm not terribly familiar with Git and I don't know Rust but I think I found the problem.
I see in the code it's searching for "magick" and not "convert" at line 88 in model.rs here:
https://github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter/blob/develop/imessage-exporter/src/app/compatibility/models.rs

I downloaded the source, changed this line, and recompiled. It now works! It even gets the stickers - woohoo!

Now, do you support putting people's names in the chat instead of the phone numbers?

[ReagentX]

Support for legacy convert was removed in Beach Strawberry because convert was deprecated by ImageMagick. See #263. Given your logs above, you have a very old copy of ImageMagick installed (specifically 6.9.11-60); #328 will solve your problem.

Also, see #62.

[nraygun]

I was able to install ImageMagick 7.1.1-44 by compiling it from source. I now have magick and imessage-exporter seems to find it.

I'm still getting errors of the form, "Unable to update "/home/user/imessage_export/attachments/6/579.jpeg" metadata: No such file or directory (os error 2)"

This is the same error I reported earlier where I grabbed the standalone version of ImageMagick(AppImage I think).
In the version I modified to use "convert" I can see these missing files. They end in ".jpeg".

[ReagentX]

This sounds like a problem with your configuration and platform, not an issue with imessage-exporter. As I mentioned above, that error suggests that the file did not get converted at all, so there was no new file to write the metadata to.

[nraygun]

Agreed.
I'm on MX Linux and it focuses on stability versus staying current on packages. I'm sure it's got something to do with that.
I'll either continue to investigate why it doesn't work in my environment or just use the version I modified with the old "convert" app. It seemed to work great with the old app. If I figure out how to make it work with the new magick app, I'll post it here.

Thanks for making such a fantastic piece of software available and thanks for all of your help!!!