December 13, 2024

How to Make iPhone PNGs Viewable and Editable

Posted December 4, 2007 at 4:49pm by iClarified
You might notice that any image (PNG) taken from the iPhone is not viewable on your computer. In fact when I tried to open the png in Preview it only displayed a grey question mark.
How to Make iPhone PNGs Viewable and Editable

The reason the PNG is not viewing correctly is thanks to Apple. The PNG images found on the iPhone include extra data before the PNG header and compressed image data without the traditional headers and footers. Also, the red blue pixels are flipped (BGRA instead of RGBA). This is a pain but thankfully a little app by ChromaticRain makes it easy.

Step One
I'll assume you already know how to ssh into your iPhone and copy a PNG to your computer otherwise you wouldn't have realized this problem. Obtain the images you are looking to fix then continue to Step Two.


Step Two
Download FixPngDroplet.zip from: here.

Step Three
Double click the zip file to extract it.
How to Make iPhone PNGs Viewable and Editable

Step Four
A FixPngDroplet folder will be extracted. Inside this folder you will see a file called libjpeg-libpng(universal).dmg. If you haven't installed this before then double click this file to mount the dmg.
How to Make iPhone PNGs Viewable and Editable

Step Five
A popup window will appear showing the install package for libpng and libjpeg. Double click the icon to begin the install.
How to Make iPhone PNGs Viewable and Editable

Step Six
Click the Continue button in the window that appears to begin installation.
How to Make iPhone PNGs Viewable and Editable

Step Seven
Click the Install button to install the libraries.
How to Make iPhone PNGs Viewable and Editable

Step Eight
If prompted for an administrative name and password please enter this then click the Ok button.
How to Make iPhone PNGs Viewable and Editable

Step Ten
Once the install is finished click the Close button to finish.
How to Make iPhone PNGs Viewable and Editable

Step Eleven
Go back to the FixPngDroplet folder we extracted earlier. Notice inside the folder is an Application called FixPngDroplet. Any iPhone PNGs we drag and drop onto this application will be automatically fixed. You can actually drag multiple images to fixed at one time.
How to Make iPhone PNGs Viewable and Editable

Step Twelve
Open a new Finder window by selecting its icon in the dock then pressing Command+n on the keyboard to open a new window. Navigate to where the images needing to be fixed are. NOTE***: Make sure the folder name and path containing the images doesn't have a space in it.
How to Make iPhone PNGs Viewable and Editable

Step Thirteen
Drag the FixPngDroplet application into the same Finder window as your pngs to be fixed.
How to Make iPhone PNGs Viewable and Editable

Step Fourteen
Select the images you would like to convert then drag and drop them on top of the FixPngDroplet Application.
How to Make iPhone PNGs Viewable and Editable

Step Thirteen
The application will popup a message letting you know if it was successful.
How to Make iPhone PNGs Viewable and Editable

Notice how the icon preview in Finder works now!
How to Make iPhone PNGs Viewable and Editable
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Comments (11)
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soya
soya - March 11, 2015 at 11:36am
what if I get the message "This is not a PNG file. I require a PNG file! (1)"?
Hugh
Hugh - September 30, 2010 at 5:01pm
The BGRA to RGBA does not work. suggestions?
projectIncomplete
projectIncomplete - December 30, 2010 at 4:35pm
its says that a program form chromatic rain can fix that, BUT i can't find it if you have photoshop open de png en then open the channel mixer (under ajustments) select red then set red to 0 and blue to 100 then select blue and set red to 100 and blue to 0 and ur done!
khempfer
khempfer - July 8, 2011 at 12:22pm
after I fixed the pngs, the RGB is still messed up. What am I doing wrong?
Ahi
Ahi - April 16, 2010 at 2:31am
If you have spaces then use do shell script fixpng & " " & quoted form of aFilePath & " " & quoted form of aFilePath
jimusik
jimusik - August 30, 2008 at 12:05pm
for anyone else having a similar "no such file or directory error" it will not work if any of your folders include a space. For example: "user/jimusik/iphone/system images/mute.png" will give you an error message. if you remove the space "user/jimusik/iphone/systemimages/mute.png" it will not error out. Hope this helps someone else.
Jomody
Jomody - February 11, 2008 at 6:19pm
Hello, I receive: "Bad CPU type in executable". What is the problem?
Vlad
Vlad - February 11, 2008 at 8:58am
Hello, CS/iClarified. I want to know if/how I can reorganize the photos on my iPhone, plus adding more photo albums ? Now I have only the "Camera Roll" album, and photos are put only in this one.
iClarified
iClarified - December 8, 2007 at 1:10pm
Yes, you can replace any png on the iPhone :)
brad pitt
brad pitt - December 8, 2007 at 5:53am
does that mean you can replace the png's on the iphone?
Someone
Someone - December 7, 2007 at 4:58pm
For some reason, when I try to fix the images, the BGRA -> RGBA (red to blue) flipping does not work. Everything else works fine though...
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