imessage-reader updated to version 0.6.1

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An updated version of the Python program imessage-reader is available on PyPI (Python Package Index).

The new version can be installed via pip:

pip3 install --upgrade imessage-reader

Windows users will have to be patient. The imessage-reader can be installed, but an error message appears indicating that the operating system is not yet supported:

$ imessage_reader
Your operating system is not supported yet!

However, this will change in the future.

What’s new?

In the older versions only the SQLite3 file “chat.db” was read. This file is located in the Library directory under macOS:

~/Library/Messages

The program was started with the following command:

$ imessage_reader

This resulted in the chat.db database being read. The messages were then displayed in the terminal (along with the user ID, date, time and caller ID).

Now it is possible to specify a path, which allows using this program on a Linux system. Assuming “chat.db” is in the ~/Documents directory. the following statement can now be used:

imessage_reader -p ~/Documents

Instead of the relative path, the absolute path can also be specified, e.g. (under Linux):

imessage_reader -p /home/bodo/Documents

If you want to save the data in an Excel file, you can use the -o e (or -o excel) option after specifying the path:

imessage_reader -p ~/Documents  -o e

The Excel file generated is saved in the documents directory in the format iMessage-Data_<Date>.xlsx.

The option -o s can be used to create a (new) SQLite file:

imessage_reader -o s

For more information, see the README file in the Github repository. If you want to contribute code to this project, you should take a look at the CONTRIBUTING file.