How do I get video into the iPhone simulator camera roll in iOS 4.2?

I found a way that seems to work in most versions of the simulator (confirmed for 6.1):

  1. Start up the simulator and navigate to the photos app from the home screen.
  2. Drag and drop an .m4v file from your file system onto the simulator window. The video will now be playing in safari.
  3. Click "done" in the upper left hand corner.
  4. Click on the "share" button and select "save to camera roll"

You're done!


In Xcode 10+, you can just drag-and-drop the video(s) into the simulator. If the Photos app is not open already, it will open and show the videos right there alongside the built-in sample photos.


For XC6 simulators, you can search for the simulator directory with this command-line command:

For example, if you want to find the directory with the "5s" device:

grep -r -e "5s" --include="device.plist" ~/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices

Once you have the folder, you can navigate to:

<your-sim>/data/Media/DCIM/100APPLE

and copy your files in there. When you launch the simulator, you should open the Photos app and it should "restore" the metadata for the media. If that's not the case, you can also remove the "Downloads" and "PhotoData" folders and relaunch the simulator.