Saving iPhone text message history?

MBAtarga · 11-08-2021, 06:53 PM

Without going into details, my wife has a string of text messages from two different individuals that we would like to save and retain as evidence for a financial matter involving a credit card transaction.

Most everything I find on-line in searches offers a method of synching the phone with a PC using itunes and doing a backup of sorts, OR - make multiple screen snapshots to save the photos as a PDF. The screen snapshots will take too much time for one.

Anyone know of a method/app (preferably free) that would accomplish this "simple" task?

stomachmonkey · 11-08-2021, 06:58 PM

"Save and retain" is vague.

Could mean a number of things.

The question I have is what format do you ultimately want or need them in for presentation as evidence?

Or do you just want to make sure you don't lose any?

MBAtarga · 11-08-2021, 07:06 PM

Output to a PDF would be preferable.

Bill Douglas · 11-08-2021, 07:35 PM

Before you try anything risky, take a few (camera) photos of the main ones. Nothing like having a plan B in progress.

stomachmonkey · 11-08-2021, 07:46 PM

Touch and hold a message.

You get options pop up, select the "More" option.

Noe every individual message will have a circle next to it.

Select each message by tapping the circle.

Lower right hit the arrow and it will pop up a new message with the selected messages in it.

Tap and hold in body, select all, copy.

Now you can share to an email or open Notes on the phone and paste in.

The primary issue with that approach is you lose the distinction of who said what and timestamps which I think is less than ideal for evidence.

If you really need to keep it all threaded as a conversation with time stamps there really is no simple free way to do it.

Look for a 3rd party utility like iMazing.

Some things are worth the cost, this is one of those times.

cabmandone · cabmandone's Garage

I just did screenshots and sent the screenshots to my email.

As SM pointed out, there are a lot of 3rd party solutions for this. I was looking into them during a legal matter but the attorney I was working with said screenshots were sufficient.

GH85Carrera · GH85Carrera's Garage

You might contact the service provider and see if they have a way to capture the text string. I have no doubt at all that they have been contacted by many attorneys in the past for exactly that thing. Output the string with time stamps and who said what.

MBAtarga · 11-09-2021, 07:41 AM

We really need timestamps to be reflected from the text history - and screenshots are possible but would end up being several dozen - which makes it difficult to track the chronology of all of them and retain timestamp data.

I'll look into iMazing.

stomachmonkey · 11-09-2021, 08:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MBAtarga

I'll look into iMazing.

It'll do more than just messages so generally worth the $35.00 for a single device.

https://imazing.com

MBAtarga · 11-09-2021, 09:22 AM

Thanks! iMazing worked for what we needed. Using the trial version I got all text messages with date/time stamps on the home PC. I was able to get the evidence needed for the vendor dispute. If need be, I'll register the product if we need to export PDFs (which the trial version doesn't have enabled.)

stomachmonkey · 11-09-2021, 09:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MBAtarga

Thanks! iMazing worked for what we needed. Using the trial version I got all text messages with date/time stamps on the home PC. I was able to get the evidence needed for the vendor dispute. If need be, I'll register the product if we need to export PDFs (which the trial version doesn't have enabled.)

Just "print" the text doc and select PDF as the output.

PDF output is supported by the OS.

MBAtarga · 11-09-2021, 10:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stomachmonkey

Just "print" the text doc and select PDF as the output.

PDF output is supported by the OS.

The trial version limits any output method (PDF, Excel, text) to 25 messages - so that won't work. I was able to capture screen snapshots from the iMazing app and past into Word. That suits my purpose for the time.

stomachmonkey · 11-09-2021, 10:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MBAtarga

The trial version limits any output method (PDF, Excel, text) to 25 messages - so that won't work. I was able to capture screen snapshots from the iMazing app and past into Word. That suits my purpose for the time.

Ahhh, so it was more than 25 texts.

OK