So this has been a useful Saturday morning.

Digikam - has a really solid set of search tools, let me quickly set up a filtered list showing my iPhone photos, which then showed me some (unexpected) gaps in my photo archive. (if you've never taken a look at the files, the images are numbered in sequence, so a missing number = a missing photo.)

Grabbed iPhone, pulled over the missing months. Done.

Also, have managed to (mostly) backup my iPhone to my Linux Mint laptop. That was a bit arduous, recipe follows.

There are 2, potentially 3, steps if you want to do this.

Archive your iphone.

This reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/1euono4/importing_imessage_data_from_iphone_to_linux/) says that you can use libimobiledevice to make an unencrypted backup of your iPhone.

Last updated in 2020, but what's the worst that can happen, right? (Documentation suggests that it is being checked against iOS updates and continues to work so....I guess?)

The project's webpage has install instructions for both Debian and Ubuntu (https://libimobiledevice.org/#get-started), I followed the Ubuntu script and, ok so far so good, installation complete.

Connecting my iphone, telling it to trust my laptop, and then entering ideviceinfo into the terminal showed that it could see and get data from my iphone.

(This thread was helpful with syntax questions that came up during the next step (spaces are your friend) https://askubuntu.com/questions/1127798/how-to-run-a-iphone-backup-with-idevicebackup2

From there, open notepad and build out instructions to pull a full, unencrypted archive of my phone.

back into terminal, work through the mistakes, and voila, a 200GB backup sitting in my documents folder.

inhale, exhale, go for a walk

Step 2 (or 2 and 3)

imessage-exporter works on iPhone backups. And following the steps above, we now have one.

So how do we get this thing running on Linux Mint.

Fortunately, there is a binary.

https://github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter/blob/develop/imessage-exporter/README.md

Using something called cargo.

Hmmmm.

Anyway. (and this is the potential extra step) entering that command into Terminal told me that

1- cargo is installed
2- it's out of date

the additional step -> Great. update cargo, and what the heck is cargo anyway.

Poking around (and I did a lot of poking around this morning, I've no idea where this misplaced confidence in my computer skills came from today but whatever) I found that

Cargo is part of the Rust environment; and

Rustup (claims) that using this _completely different_ set of terminal commands will install a current version of things.

Ok. sure.

So I did that and then repeated the imessage-exporter install. Which failed, with the same error message.

I will now jump forward a lot of time, and provide the answer which is to close, and then reopen, the Terminal. It needed that to refresh the version of Cargo.

This time, entering
cargo install imessage-exporter
worked.

So, the sequence so far

install libimobiledevice
use devicebackup2 to build a full iPhone archive
install imessage-exporter