Retrieving cached photos from Grindr

[alexh110]

Hi,
I was wondering if there's any way to retrieve and save photos cached by the Grindr app?
Whilst on a day-trip I saw a couple of profile pics that I meant to save; but forgot (also forgot to favourite them). Now I'm back home those people are too far away to show up in my cascade, and I can't really go all the way back there just to save a couple of photos!

I'm sure the app. does cache all the profile photos to local storage on your iPad, because it loads them very fast when you've seen those people before; but takes a long time to load new people. Not sure how long they'll remain in the cache before being wiped though?
They probably wouldn't be hard to locate with a file explorer app; but would I need to jailbreak my iPad first?

Thanks for any help!

 

[f4780y]

I'm not familiar with the app, but if you have a jailbroken iPad you gain full access to the file system, therefore, if app images are cached within the app (and assuming the don't encrypt them or do something else "strange" with them), then in theory you can use an application such as iFile to get to them and move them into your photos app, or anywhere else.

Hope that helps.

 

[alexh110]

Thanks!
Unfortunately I have an iPad 2, and I've just read they're not jailbroken yet.
Don't suppose there's any workaround for accessing the file system?

I've read that "GoodReader" and Colorfulphone's "ifileExplorer" can get some access to files in other apps; but I suspect not to cache directories. (Was it the Colorfulphone app. you were referring to?)

Supposing a JB becomes available, is the iFile app. similar to the file explorer on my Windows PC? So that for example I would be able to search the whole iPad flashdrive for *.jpg?

 

[f4780y]

Nope, sorry, if you have an iPad2 you are out of luck. No way to get into an apps files and interrogate them unless you are jailbroken.

And yes, iFile is just like an explorer app for iPad / iPhone. All the same features you would expect.

 

[alexh110]

Thanks.
I'll just have to hope a JB comes out soon, and that my cache doesn't get overwritten before then! Perhaps if I avoid using the app., it's less likely to overwrite the data.
(I'm guessing it would be impossible to undelete anything from a flash-drive, as you would from a hard-drive.)

 

[alexh110]

Just a thought, but what about the backup that iTunes makes on my PC?
I wonder how much of the application data it backs up, and whether this would include the Grindr cache? If so I could presumably locate the file in question on my PC; or would it be stored in an encrypted and inaccessible form?

 

[alexh110]

Very surprisingly this actually worked!

I downloaded some software called iBackupbot onto my PC, which (amongst other things) allows you to view any media files stored in your iPad backups, including the cache directories.
Using this I was able to retrieve exactly the files I wanted and save them to a new location on my PC.

So no JB necessary after all!

 

[f4780y]

Glad you got a solution. There's just no way to tell what a developer will choose to store and therefore have iTunes backup for their app. A cache is usually temporary and not reliable, but hey, if you got the images you were after, good for you.

 

[addiosamigo]

You could have probably done the same using either diskaid or iPhone explorer!

 

[alexh110]

Surprisingly the cache had never been emptied, and still had all the image files stored since I bought my iPad 6 weeks ago!