WhatsApp chat viewer: read an exported chat with its photos

What it shows

• The conversation. One bubble per message with the sender's name in their colour, the time, and messages that ran over several lines kept as one message. Pick who you are and your messages move to the right. Notices such as “Messages and calls are end-to-end encrypted”, “Alice joined using this group's invite link”, “left”, “added” and subject changes are shown as centred notes, not as somebody's message.
• The media, in place. In an export made with media, each <attached: 00000012-PHOTO-2023-12-31-21-04-05.jpg> (iPhone) or IMG-20231231-WA0003.jpg (file attached) (Android) line is matched to the file in the ZIP and shown where it was sent: photos and .webp stickers as pictures, videos and voice notes (.opus) as players, documents as a link to save. Lines that say <Media omitted> or “image omitted” say so. Files in the ZIP that no message points to are listed at the end.
• Search and filters. Search finds words, names and file names, ignoring capitals and accents (“chloe” finds Chloé), with a hit count and arrows to jump between hits. Show one person's messages only, or a date range.
• The numbers. Messages per person with their share, the first and last message, the busiest day, and how many photos, videos and other files were sent.
• Two ways to keep it. “Save as HTML” writes one file with the conversation and its photos, voice notes and videos embedded (files up to 16 MB each, 160 MB in all), which any browser opens offline, years from now, with no script in it. “Save as CSV” writes date, time, sender, text and attachment, one row per message, for a spreadsheet. Both save what the filters show, so you can keep one person's messages or one month.

Getting the export from your phone

iPhone

Open the chat, tap the contact's or group's name at the top, scroll down and tap Export Chat, then Attach Media (or Without Media). Choose Save to Files: that gives a ZIP named “WhatsApp Chat - Name.zip” holding _chat.txt and the media. Open this page in Safari on the phone and choose the ZIP from Files, or move it to a computer first.

Android

Open the chat, tap ⋮ (More options) › More › Export chat, then Include media (or Without media). Save it to Files or Google Drive rather than sending it: it arrives as “WhatsApp Chat with Name.zip”, or as “WhatsApp Chat with Name.txt” with the media as separate files. In the second case, put the .txt and the media in one ZIP to see the media here, or drop the .txt alone for the text.

How much it holds

WhatsApp's help pages say an export with media carries the latest 10,000 messages, and one without media up to 40,000. For a longer chat, export it without media to get more of its history.

What this cannot do

• Open the phone's encrypted backup. The Android backup files msgstore.db.crypt14 and msgstore.db.crypt15, and the iCloud or iTunes backup of an iPhone, are encrypted with keys kept by WhatsApp and the phone. This page reads only the file made with Export chat.
• Restore a chat into WhatsApp. WhatsApp has no way to import an exported chat; only its own backup restores messages to a phone.
• Show deleted messages. An export does not contain deleted messages: one deleted for everyone appears as “This message was deleted”, and one you deleted for yourself is not there at all.
• Show what the export leaves out. Reactions, polls, the quoted message a reply was answering, and view-once photos are not written into the export. Media from an export made without media, or lost because the phone no longer had the file, appear only as their names.
• Play every voice note in every browser. Voice notes are Opus audio in an Ogg file. Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma or later play them; older Safari cannot, and the page says so and offers the file to save.
• Prove anything. An export is a plain text file that anyone can edit before handing it over; this page shows what is in the file, not that it is unchanged. Courts and lawyers usually want the phone itself or a forensic copy for that.

Useful to know about the export file

Two shapes of line

An iPhone writes [31/12/2023, 21:04:05] Alice: Happy new year, with seconds and square brackets. Android writes 31/12/2023, 21:04 - Alice: Happy new year, to the minute. A line that does not start with a date belongs to the message above it, which is how a message with line breaks survives the export.

Day first or month first

The dates follow the phone's region setting, and the file does not say which it used. 03/04/2024 is 3 April in the UK and 4 March in the US. The page reads the whole file: a date like 13/04/2024 can only be day first and 04/13/2024 only month first. If every day in the chat is the 12th or earlier, both readings are possible; the page then asks, and switching takes one tap.

12-hour times and invisible characters

In US English, times look like 9:04 PM, and newer phones put a narrow no-break space (U+202F) before PM, which trips up many scripts that split on ordinary spaces. iPhone exports also put an invisible left-to-right mark (U+200E) before attachment lines and notices. Both are handled here, and the CSV gives every time as 24-hour 21:04:00.

Group chats and unsaved numbers

In a group export each line carries the sender's name as saved in the exporting phone's contacts, or their phone number when it was not saved (newer iPhones write “~ Name” for those). The person who made the export appears under their own name or as “You” in notices.