Mass download photos/videos from Viber on your iPhone

I couldn’t believe it took me more than half a day to find a free and reliable way to download all photos/videos from Viber on my iPhone for backup on my computer. Most guides on the Internet tell me to either save the items one by one (which would be too time consuming) or to enable Save to Gallery from Viber (which would not work for photos already downloaded). Disappointingly, there doesn’t appear to be a way to download the photos/videos as JPG/MOV files from Viber’s iCloud backup. There are also several paid tools which cost $99 or $199 annually, an amount I am not willing to spend.

Fortunately after some efforts I found iTunes-Backup-Explorer by MaxiHuHe04, an open-source tool written in Java which allows you to browse your iTunes backup from iPhone/iPad and extract (or even insert) files as needed. To test it out, first perform a full unencrypted local backup (e.g. without a password) of your iPhone/iPad using iTunes for Windows. Then, download Java runtime (at least JRE 11 is required) and the itunes-backup-explorer-1.4.jar file. Once downloaded, click the JAR file to open iTunes Backup Explorer and your device backup should have already been identified. You can just click on the Files tab, expand the Application node and then select AppDomain-com.viber (or similar entry with the Viber icon). From there, expand Document node on the right panel and you should be able to see your photos (.JPG) and videos (.MP4) under Attachments. Right click the entry you are interested in and select Extract file – you can also select multiple files and select Export selected files:

With this I was able to download all Viber photos/videos from my iPhone within 15 minutes to my computer, without having to pay a single cent! I was lucky as the attachments were not encrypted; I assume Viber’s end-to-end encryption only apply to text messages and not to attachments. Interestingly, the tool also allows me to replace an existing file with a new version, delete a file or add a new file (which for whatever reason is disabled on my backup). I have not tried these options, for I find no use for them. In any case, adding a new file to the attachment folder is useless if the relevant metadata is not added to Viber’s message database (or whatever that is). Replacing a file with another version might cause Viber to refuse to open the file thinking that the message might have been tampered with, assuming Viber keeps a hash of the file in its database.

I hope you will find this guide useful. The same steps might work for WhatsApp to extract attachments, assuming they are not end-to-end encrypted. If the tool does not detect your backup automatically, use File > Open Backup and point to the C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup or C:\Users\[username]\Apple\MobileSync\Backup folder. Finally, remember not to encrypt your backup, otherwise iTunes-Backup-Explorer will not be able to open it.