Recovering Photos From an iPhone or iPodTouch For Free

I hunted around till I finally figured this one out.   Apple won't let you mount these new devices as a drive I guess to prevent hacking (which as always only made people hack it).   There are programs out there to do this which cost money, but most are not even compatible with the iPhone and touch yet.   So I had to hunt...

I used a program called "DiskAid" (http://www.digidna.net/diskaid/) to copy the "Photos" directory from my iPod Touch.  This gets you the lovely ithmb files which are basically big image archives.  Then I used a quick and dirty but capable program called "Keith's iPod Photo Reader" (http://keithwiley.com/software/keithsIPodPhotoReader.shtml) to extract the images from there.  

The second program is only for use by the hacker as it doesn't have any idea how to decode the images unless you tell it.  For the iPhone/iTouch though I'll give you the settings you need.   First open the .ithmb files starting with "F3008" one at a time.  Use the setting of 640x480, 16 bit RGB, Flip Endian and 0 byte offset and then extract the files.

Now you've got a big pile of old .pct files which you can convert back to jpg if you want.  

Have fun!