In wireless multimedia sensor networks (W-MSNs), the energy consumption of multimedia data type are much higher than that of traditional wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Heavy multimedia data relaying operation causes not only single sensor node dead early, but also ‘hot spots’ problem. In this paper, a novel energy efficient data gathering scheme with a mobile sink for WMSNs, BTDGS, is proposed. It is based on a virtual binary-tree infrastructure. The mobile sink moves along a predefined circle trajectory, and sensor nodes relay data packages in a greedy manner. The process of BTDGS data gathering includes sink location broadcasting phase, data collection phase, and sink leaving broadcasting phase. The simulation results show that our BTDGS is an energy effective, reliable, timely, and sojourn time adaptive data gathering scheme. It is feasible and suitable for WMSNs.