[m463]

I think things like text messages and related memories are being lost because companies like apple jealously prevent exporting and saving. (camera roll allows export)

Lots of relatives lost a phone or access to an account and with it, all photos from friends, text messages to deceased loved ones, and more.

all this stuff should be exportable to multiple places for lots of backups on all kinds of media.

[MarsIronPI]

I've exported my entire photo collection from my iPad. Granted, it was on the smaller side. What I did was select all the photos, upload them to Google Drive, then download the resulting Drive folder onto my laptop. Terribly slow and hacky, and not something you'd want to do regularly, but as a one-off it worked well.

(I was getting rid of the device and simply wanted the entire collection of photos off it.)

[robrain]

Messages, select user, click the user icon to get to the info page, click Photos, Edit, Select, Download -> photos are in the Photos app and you can do what you want with them.

Not the easiest operation, but hardly jealously prevented.

[robrain]

Self-reply addendum - individual photos can be dealt with with a simple long-press, no need for delving into the info page for the user.

[rhyperior]

And do that individually for each of the thousands of photos? There’s no select All. Yikes.

[m463]

yes, photos/camera roll is ok... if you mount an iphone as a usb device you get the DCIM/IMG_0000.jpg kind of thing.

But text messages are jealously guarded and not exportable. Apple does this for itself, not its users.