How to export a WhatsApp chat, step by step

Exporting a chat is the one thing WhatsApp lets you do with your own history without any extra tool. It takes about thirty seconds. It is also less complete than most people assume, and it is worth knowing exactly what you are getting before you rely on it.

Here are the steps on both platforms, then a look inside the file itself.

On Android

1. Open the chat you want to keep.
2. Tap the three dots in the top corner.
3. Tap More, then Export chat.
4. Choose Include media to keep photos and voice notes, or Without media for a much smaller file.
5. Pick where it goes: save to Drive or Files, or send it to yourself in an email or another app.

Including media produces a .zip. Choosing without media may produce a plain .txt instead, depending on how you share it.

On iPhone

1. Open the chat.
2. Tap the contact or group name at the top of the screen.
3. Scroll to the bottom and tap Export Chat.
4. Choose Attach Media or Without Media.
5. Save it to Files, AirDrop it to a Mac, or send it to yourself.

The iPhone route matters more than it looks: iPhone has no accessible local backup file, so this is the only way to get a chat off an iPhone in a form another program can read.

What is actually in the file

Open the ZIP and you find one text file plus the media, sitting loose in the same folder.

The text file is named after the conversation — on Android something like WhatsApp Chat with Sara.txt, on iPhone usually _chat.txt. Inside, every message is one line, and the line format differs by platform:

12/03/2024, 21:14 - Sara: are you coming tomorrow?          (Android)
[12/03/2024, 21:14:09] Sara: are you coming tomorrow?       (iPhone)

Messages that run over several lines simply continue on the next line with no timestamp, which is how a reader can tell them apart from a new message.

Attachments are referenced by filename, again differently per platform:

IMG-20240312-WA0007.jpg (file attached)     (Android)
<attached: 00000042-PHOTO-2024-03-12.jpg>   (iPhone)

Android's naming is predictable and tells you the type at a glance:

If you chose Without media, every one of those lines is replaced with <Media omitted> instead — the message stays, the content is gone.

The two limits

This is the part that catches people out. WhatsApp does not export the whole conversation. It exports the most recent messages until it hits a cap:

There is no warning, no marker in the file, and no line saying anything was left out. The text simply begins mid-conversation on some arbitrary day.

So you are forced to choose between the whole conversation as bare text, or roughly a quarter of it with pictures. For a chat a few months old, neither limit matters. For a family group running since 2019, both do. There is more on where these numbers come from and how to check whether yours was cut in why WhatsApp's export stops at 40,000 messages.

What else does not survive

Even inside the limits, the export is a flattening. It is a text file, so anything that is not text has to be thrown away or turned into text:

• Replies lose their link to the message they answered. You get the reply, but nothing marks what it was replying to.
• Reactions are not exported at all.
• Edited messages appear in their edited form with no history.
• Deleted messages appear as a line saying the message was deleted, if they appear at all.
• Polls, locations and contact cards come through as a rough text summary.
• View-once media is never included.

None of this is a bug. Export was designed for handing one conversation to someone else — a receipt, an argument, a thread you need to forward to a lawyer — not for archiving five years of your life.

How to open what you exported

A .txt file opens in any text editor, and for a short chat that is genuinely enough. For anything longer it becomes unreadable quickly: no bubbles, no sender colours, and the media sitting in a separate pile of files named IMG-20240312-WA0007.jpg with nothing connecting them to the messages they belong to.

Dropping the ZIP or TXT into WaChat Web puts it back together: messages in bubbles with dates, media matched to the message that contained it, voice notes playable, and search across the whole file. It runs entirely in the browser — the file is read on your device and nothing is uploaded.

If your export was truncated, WaChat also tells you so rather than letting you assume the file is complete.

When the export is the wrong tool

Be honest with yourself about the size of the conversation. If it is longer than the caps, exporting gives you a partial archive that looks complete, which is worse than knowing you have a partial one.

On Android there is a route with no cap at all: WhatsApp's own encrypted backup, msgstore.db.crypt15, holds every message in every chat, and you can open it with your own 64-digit key. That is a longer setup — you need the key and the file — but it is the difference between a fragment and the whole thing.

On iPhone that file is not reachable, so the export really is your only option. In that case, export without media to get the longer 40,000-message history, and if you also need the photos, export a second time with media and keep both files.

Where to go from here

The export takes half a minute and works on every phone. It gives you the most recent 10,000 messages with media, or 40,000 without, and flattens replies and reactions on the way out. For a recent conversation that is fine. For a long one it is a fragment.

• The step-by-step version with screenshots lives in the help centre: exporting a chat from WhatsApp.
• If your file came out short, start with why my export is cut off.
• To get a chat with no message limit at all, the import guide walks through the backup-and-key route on Android.