How to Export a WhatsApp Chat

Export is the only way to get a WhatsApp conversation out of WhatsApp in a form anything else can read. Backups are encrypted and only WhatsApp can open them; an export is a plain text file plus the attachments, readable forever by anything.

It is also quietly limited in ways the interface never mentions, and those limits are what catch people who export a ten-year group chat and assume they have the lot.

The method

Identical in structure on both platforms, with the menu in slightly different places.

iPhone:

1. Open the chat.
2. Tap the contact or group name at the top.
3. Scroll to the bottom and tap Export Chat.
4. Choose Attach Media or Without Media.
5. The share sheet opens. Pick where it goes — Files, Mail, Drive, anywhere.

Android:

1. Open the chat.
2. Tap the three-dot menu at the top right.
3. Tap More → Export chat.
4. Choose Include media or Without media.
5. Pick a destination from the share sheet.

On both, step four is the decision that matters, and the rest of this guide is about why.

What you actually get

The text file looks like this, one message per line:

15/03/2026, 19:42 - Sarah: are we still on for Thursday
15/03/2026, 19:44 - You: yes, 7pm
15/03/2026, 19:45 - Sarah: IMG-20260315-WA0003.jpg (file attached)

Plain, greppable, and openable in any text editor forty years from now. That is the point of the format.

The limits that bite

This is the part worth reading before you rely on an export for anything important.

Media exports are capped. Exporting with media covers roughly the most recent 10,000 messages and their attachments. A busy group chat crosses that in a few months. Exporting without media covers a substantially larger span.

Truncation is silent. WhatsApp does not warn you that the export is partial. Open the .txt file and look at the first date in it. If it is nowhere near when the conversation started, you have a slice rather than the whole thing.

Share-sheet destinations impose their own limits. Emailing an export with media routinely fails because the attachment exceeds the mail provider’s size limit. Save to Files or Drive instead, then move it from there.

Deleted messages do not reappear. Export reads what is currently in the chat. Anything deleted for everyone, or disappearing messages that already disappeared, is not in your local copy and will not be in the export.

Voice notes are .opus. Fine in VLC or any current browser, awkward in older media players. Convert them if you need to share them with someone on ancient software.

Which option to pick

Without media for anything you want to read, search or keep as a record: conversations, agreements, dates, addresses. The file is small, exports in seconds, reaches much further back, and emails anywhere.

With media when the photos are the point — a chat with family, a trip, a project with shared documents. Expect a large file and a slow export, and expect it to stop well short of the beginning on a long chat.

For a long chat where you want both reach and files, do both: one export without media for the full transcript, one with media for the recent attachments.

Getting an export off the phone sensibly

Where you send it determines whether it is useful later.

• Files or iCloud Drive on iPhone, then move it to a computer. Avoids the mail size ceiling entirely.
• Google Drive on Android. Note that Drive shares the same 15GB pool as Gmail and Photos, so a multi-gigabyte media export will eat into it — the split is explained in what is really using your Google storage.
• Straight to a computer by cable. The most durable option for a large export. On Android this means USB file transfer, which has its own reliability quirks — covered in why an Android phone does not show up on a PC.

Once it is on a computer, treat it like any other archive: keep it somewhere backed up, not in a Downloads folder you will clear out in a year.

When export is the right tool

Export solves a narrow set of problems well.

• Switching platforms and losing the history. Export the handful of chats that matter before the migration that will not carry them.
• Keeping a record. A conversation that may be needed later as evidence of an arrangement reads better as a dated text file than as screenshots.
• Clearing storage without losing content. Export a huge chat with media, verify the export, then delete the chat’s media from the phone. The full approach is in reducing WhatsApp storage without deleting chats.

And where it does not help: it is not a backup. There is no import function, so an exported chat cannot be put back into WhatsApp. It is an archive for human reading, not a restore point.

Realistic outcomes

A text-only export of a normal one-to-one conversation finishes in a few seconds and produces a file of a few megabytes covering years. That case works exactly as advertised.

A media export of a large group chat is a different experience: minutes of preparation, hundreds of megabytes or several gigabytes of output, and a transcript that starts somewhere in the middle of the conversation’s life. Check the first line of the text file every time, because that is the only honest signal of how much you got.