How to export a WhatsApp chat (iPhone and Android)

WhatsApp has a built-in “Export chat” feature that works for group chats and one-to-one chats alike. It does not need any extra app, it does not notify the other people in the chat, and it produces a plain text file with every message that is stored on your phone. The steps are slightly different on iPhone and Android, so pick your phone below.

Exporting on iPhone

1. Open the chat or group you want to export.
2. Tap the chat name at the very top of the screen (the bar with the group name or the person’s name). This opens the “Group Info” or “Contact Info” screen.
3. Scroll all the way to the bottom and tap Export Chat.
4. WhatsApp asks whether to attach media. Choose Without Media (the other option is Attach Media).
5. The iOS share sheet opens. Pick where the file goes: Save to Files, Mail, AirDrop to your Mac, a notes app or a message to yourself.

On iPhone the export always arrives as a .zip file, named something like “WhatsApp Chat - Sunday Dinners.zip”. Inside it there is a text file called _chat.txt, plus the photos, videos and voice notes if you chose Attach Media.

Exporting on Android

1. Open the chat or group.
2. Tap the three dots ⋮ at the top right.
3. Tap More, then Export chat.
4. Choose Without media (the other option is Include media).
5. Android shows its share menu: Gmail, Google Drive, Nearby Share/Quick Share, a messaging app, or “Save to device” depending on what you have installed.

On Android, an export without media is usually a single .txt file named “WhatsApp Chat with Sunday Dinners.txt”. Some versions and share targets wrap it in a .zip instead. Either is fine: a .zip is just a container, and the chat is the .txt inside.

Without media or with media: which one?

For reading, archiving the text or analysing the chat, Without media is almost always the better choice:

	Without media	With media
Size	Small: a busy group with years of history is often a few MB	Can easily reach hundreds of MB or more
Content	All text messages, with a placeholder where each photo, video or audio was	Text plus the actual files
Message limit (WhatsApp’s own)	About 40,000 most recent messages	About 10,000 most recent messages
Good for	Statistics, search, backups of the conversation	Keeping the photos and videos themselves

The limits in that table come from WhatsApp’s help centre, which has historically said that exports with media include up to 10,000 recent messages and exports without media up to 40,000, because of email size limits. WhatsApp can change these numbers, so treat them as approximate. The practical consequence: if your chat is very long, even the “Without media” export may only start a few years back, and the first lines of the file will tell you where it begins.

When you export without media, each photo, sticker or audio leaves a line such as <Media omitted> or image omitted, so you still know that someone sent something, just not what. If you want to know exactly what these lines look like, the guide on the WhatsApp export file format breaks the file down line by line.

Getting the file to your computer

The export lives wherever you sent it from the share menu. The easiest routes:

• iPhone to Mac: AirDrop the .zip straight to the Mac, or save it to Files > iCloud Drive and open it from Finder.
• iPhone to Windows: save to iCloud Drive (accessible at icloud.com) or email it to yourself.
• Android to anything: upload to Google Drive, or email it to yourself with Gmail.
• Staying on the phone: on iPhone “Save to Files” and on Android “Save to device” (or Drive) keep the file local, so you can open it from a mobile browser later.

Emailing works for small exports but many mail services reject attachments over about 20 to 25 MB, which is another good reason to choose Without media.

You don’t need to unzip anything if the tool you are going to use accepts .zip files. For example, Chat Recap takes either the .txt or the whole .zip (up to 25 MB), reads only the chat text inside, and never opens the photos or videos.

Troubleshooting

I can’t find “Export chat”. First check you are on the right screen: on iPhone it is at the bottom of the chat info page, on Android it is under ⋮ > More. If it really isn’t there, the most likely reason is Advanced Chat Privacy, a per-chat setting WhatsApp introduced in 2025. When anyone in the chat turns it on, nobody in that chat can export it. You’ll see it mentioned in the chat info screen; ask the person who enabled it, or the group, whether they’d turn it off temporarily. Also make sure WhatsApp is up to date.

The chat is archived. Archived chats can be exported normally. Open the Archived list, open the chat and follow the same steps. Unarchiving is not required.

The export starts in the middle of the story. That is the message limit described above. It can also happen because the export only includes what is on your phone: messages from before you joined the group, or history you lost when you changed phones without restoring a backup, simply are not there. Messages you cleared with “Clear chat” are gone too.

The file is huge. You almost certainly included media. Export again and pick Without media. A text-only export of even a very chatty group rarely goes past a few megabytes.

The dates or words look “wrong”. The file is written in your phone’s language and date format, so a Spanish phone writes Multimedia omitido, an English one <Media omitted>, and US region settings put the month first. This is normal. Good parsers detect the format automatically; if a tool expects a different one, changing the phone language before exporting is a workaround.

Business chats and communities. The WhatsApp Business app has the same export option in the chat menu. In a community, each group is exported on its own: open the specific group (or the announcements group) and export that.

Before and after you export: privacy

An export is a copy of everyone’s messages, not just yours, so treat it with some care:

• Phone numbers appear in the file. People who aren’t in your contacts are written as their number (for example +44 7700 900123), and system lines like “Sam added +44 7700 900456” include numbers too.
• Think about where you send it. Emailing it to yourself is fine; uploading it to a random website that stores files on a server is a different story. Prefer tools that process the file on your device and say so clearly in their privacy policy. Chat Recap, for instance, does the analysis in your browser; its privacy policy explains what stays local and what is sent only if you turn on the optional AI analysis.
• Ask the group if you plan to share results. Analysing your own group for fun is one thing, publishing quotes is another.
• Delete the file when you’re done. Remove it from Downloads, from the email you sent yourself and from Drive or iCloud if you uploaded it there. The original chat stays safe in WhatsApp.

For a deeper look at those habits, read how to analyse a WhatsApp chat privately.

Next step

Export one group now with Without media, open the file and scroll to the first line to see how far back it goes. If you want to know what the numbers say about your group, the guide to WhatsApp group statistics explains what each figure means and how it is calculated.