Getting a WhatsApp chat out of the app and onto a computer

The steps on iPhone

1. Open the individual or group chat.
2. Tap the contact name or group name at the top of the screen.
3. Scroll down and tap Export Chat.
4. If the chat has photos or videos in it, you get asked to choose Attach Media or Without Media.
5. Pick where it goes. Mail to yourself works, so does Save to Files, and so does AirDrop to a Mac.

WhatsApp says the export arrives as a ZIP file. Do not unzip it if you are going to feed it to anything else later, because the text file and the photos reference each other by filename and it is easier to keep them together.

If you cannot see Export Chat, scroll further. On a long group info screen it sits underneath Block and Report, near the bottom, which is why people swear it has been removed.

The steps on Android

1. Open the chat.
2. Tap the three dots in the top right.
3. Tap More, then Export chat.
4. Choose Without media or Include media.
5. Choose how to send it. Email to yourself, or Save to Drive, or Files.

The wording differs slightly between the two phones, which trips people up when they are following a guide written for the other one. iPhone says Attach Media, Android says Include media. Same thing.

On Android a Without media export usually comes out as a single .txt file rather than a ZIP. With media it is a ZIP. Either is fine to keep.

What Without Media actually drops

It drops the files, not the messages. Every photo, video, voice note, document, sticker and GIF is left out of the export. The message that carried it stays, with its timestamp and its sender, replaced by a short placeholder line where the file would have been.

The wording of that placeholder is not the same on both phones and changes with your phone's language, so do not write a script that looks for one exact phrase. What matters is that the line is still there, in the right place, with the right time on it. You can see that a photo was sent at 19:22 on the Tuesday. You just cannot see the photo.

Voice notes are the loss people regret most. There is no transcript in the export, so a voice note without media becomes a line saying a file was here and nothing else.

What is missing even when you do include the media

Three things, and none of them are obvious until you go looking for something and it is not there.

• View once messages are never exported. WhatsApp states this in its own help page. If the thing you need was sent as view once, it is not in the export and no converter can get it back.
• Only the most recent media may be attached. WhatsApp's wording is that if you choose Attach Media and send by Mail, the most recent media from the chat is added to the email. On a chat running over years, an old photo may simply not come through.
• Messages deleted for everyone are gone from your copy, so they are not in the export either. Same for disappearing messages that have already expired.

For anything else you are relying on, open the text file and check for it rather than assuming. Reactions, polls and edited messages have been handled differently across app versions and it is faster to look than to read a blog post about it.

The 40,000 message limit, honestly

Search for this and you will find dozens of pages stating that WhatsApp exports a maximum of 40,000 messages without media and 10,000 with. Those numbers get copied from site to site.

WhatsApp's own export help page, checked on 11 September 2026, does not mention any message limit at all. What it does say is the bit about the most recent media being attached. So treat the numbers as folklore that may or may not still match what the app does.

There is a way to find out for your own chat that takes ten seconds. Open the exported text file and look at the date on the very first line. If it is not as far back as you expected the conversation to go, your export was cut short and you know it before you rely on it. Do that check every time. It is the single most useful habit here, and it is the thing none of the pages arguing about 40,000 will tell you.

When the export is too big to send

A years-long group chat with media attached can run to several gigabytes, and mail will refuse it. The fix, in order of how often it works:

• Export again and choose Without Media. A chat that was 2 GB is often a few megabytes as text, because the text was never the big part.
• Send it to Files, Drive or Dropbox instead of Mail. Saving to storage does not have the size ceiling an email attachment does.
• If you need specific photos and the chat is enormous, export without media for the transcript, then save the handful of photos you actually need out of the chat by hand.

What you cannot do is export a date range. WhatsApp gives you the whole conversation or nothing, with no from and to. If you only want March, you export everything and trim it afterwards.

What the file looks like when you open it

The text file is one message per line, roughly like this:

[2026/03/04, 19:22:11] Sarah Khan: are you still coming on Saturday

Roughly, because the exact shape changes with your phone, your region and your language. Some exports use square brackets and some do not. Some use 24 hour time and some use am and pm. The date can be day first or month first. There are invisible marks at the start of some lines. None of that matters if you are reading it yourself, and all of it matters if you hand it to software, which is why free converters work on one person's export and produce nonsense on the next.

In a ZIP export the photos sit next to the text file with names like 00000042-PHOTO-2026-03-04-19-22-11.jpg, and the message line names the file. That is the link that gets broken when people unzip the folder and email the text file on its own.

Reading it without paying anyone

For a short chat, this is a solved problem and you do not need a tool. The .txt opens in Notepad, TextEdit, any code editor, or Google Docs. You can paste it into Word, set the font to something sane, and print to PDF. It will look plain, but every word and every timestamp is there.

Where that stops working is length and photos. A two year chat is tens of thousands of lines, so a plain paste gives you a wall of text with no page structure, no way to tell at a glance who said what, and the photos sitting in a separate folder that nobody reading your document will ever open. Putting each photo back beside the message it belongs to, by hand, is the job that eats an evening.

Questions, answered.