Tag: photography

Getting photos off a 15 year old flip phone with BitPim in 2024

My mom wanted us to get the photos off her old 15 year old flip phone, a LG VX 5600. This phone no longer had service, no ability to get service and had no easy way to copy images off the device to a computer. I did some research and saw 2 good Open Source choices that might work BitPim and Wammu/Gammu.

At first I wasn’t able to get either working on a modern computer (windows, linux or MacOS) All failed for various reasons but mostly due to weird error messages and incompatible or missing libraries.

I remembered I had an old laptop that could run Windows 7 and decided to go back in time. Here’s the steps I found that allowed me to copy the photos and SMS messages off the device.

  1. First I installed Windows 7 onto my old Celeron laptop, I had a key but it wouldn’t take it so I left it in unregistered mode
  2. Internet Explorer was installed but had a lot of difficulty in going to many modern web sites (maybe due to certificates / etc..)
  3. I used IE to download Supermium, a Chrome fork for old windows OS versions. https://github.com/win32ss/supermium
  4. I used this to download the LGUSBModemDriver_WHQL_Eng_Ver_4.8.1.exe installer for the LG driver required for BitPim to talk to the phone. I used a possible dodgy site to get a copy since the LG site was crashing my browser no matter what I did
  5. I installed the driver and rebooted
  6. I downloaded BitPim 1.0.7 for Windows and installed it
  7. It needs a couple MSVC DLLS which I needed to go to various places to download, mostly for MSVCP71.DLL You’ll have to find a copy of this file on the various dodgy sites as well
  8. I copied that DLL file into the BitPim directory
  9. I plugged in the phone using a USB cable and started BitPim
  10. Make sure the phone is flipped open and turned on
  11. I used Edit->Detect Phone to make sure the phone was visible to BitPim and Windows
  12. I then went to Edit->Settings and selected Phone Type: LG-VX9100 (env 2) since I read that works well enough to copy photos and SMS messages from the phone in various threads even though BitPim doesn’t officially support the VX 5600
  13. I also checked the “Read Only” checkbox in the settings to block writing to the phone
  14. To download Photos: I then clicked on the Green arrow to Get Data from phone and select Wallpaper, it took a long time but the photos were copied over to BitPims local storage
  15. To download SMS I checked SMS from the Green Arrow Get Data from phone
  16. Do NOT check the Phonebook since it will likely crash BitPim
  17. Once the photos and SMS were downloaded to BitPim you can export them to your local disk
  18. It looks like you can navigate to BitPim->Phone->Media->images and then select all and right click to save… to a local destination
  19. I also used the File->Export Media to Zip file to export the photos to a zip file
  20. I then confirmed the photos I expected were in the zip file
  21. Export SMS in a similar way if desired
  22. You now have exported the photos and SMS from your LG VX 5600 to a computer! Hurrah! Copy them off your Windows 7 machine to save permanently.
  23. I couldn’t get the PhoneBook to copy off the phone without crashing BitPim possibly another LG phone in the settings would work, or possibly you code fix the source code. I didn’t care about the phone book so didn’t work too hard on this.
  24. Good luck!