How can I copy / export a complete chat (with all media / files) to the Notebook?

Biffos · Sep 20, 2020

How can I copy / export a complete chat (with all media / files) to the Notebook (with a good presentation / readability, not only a txt file or such)?

And how can I copy / export all of the files (images, videos, etc.) only of a chat to the Notebook?

Does WhatsApp Web (on the Notebook) do it?

Hadron · Sep 20, 2020

WhatsApp Web on a computer allows you to view all of the chats that are on your phone on the computer, including media. Once chats are synced you can view them offline, and you can download media to the computer from it. You can use it to send/receive messages, but only while your phone is online and connected (you don't need to open WhatsApp on your phone).

So if you just wish to view messages on a computer it's fine. It doesn't provide a way of exporting a chat into some different app (which app would you want to import it to?), though you can copy text and download media from a chat individually. It doesn't download all media from a synced chat automatically - if you look at recent messages the images will be there, but if you scroll back to old ones you will have to reload them. So it can probably do what you want, insofar as I know what exactly you have in mind, but if you are wanting to copy the chats to something else or download the media for viewing in another app you'll probably have to do it message-by-message.

Biffos · Sep 20, 2020

Many thanks!

So if you just wish to view messages on a computer it's fine. It doesn't provide a way of exporting a chat into some different app (which app would you want to import it to?)

Not to an app, to a folder / file like WhatsApp (or was it WeChat?) can export / copies a chat to a txt file.

OK, not way to completely copy a chat to the Notebook.

"And how can I copy / export all of the files (images, videos, etc.) only of a chat to the Notebook?"
So this is not possible? Even by copying the content of the folder (or the entire folder) those are stored by WhatsApp in? I just want to copy all of the images, videos, files of a single chat to a single folder on my Notebook / hard drive.

Some time ago there was an export option in WhatsApp, but obviously it is gone now.

Hadron · Sep 20, 2020

WhatsApp itself has backup options (and it automatically does daily local backups to your phone in /sdard/WhatsApp/Databases), and it stores media on your phone as well (/sdcard/WhatsApp/Media). So you can easily copy the media somewhere else, but that will be all of the media from all chats: you'll have to go through them manually to extract the media associated to a particular chat.

The chat backups will contain the information on which media are assoociated to which chat. However I'm pretty sure the local backups are encrypted (the filenames indicate this), which makes them unsuitable for what you seem to want (though if you just want a backup that's not on the phone itself then copying the /sdcard/WhatsApp folder to your computer will achieve that). If you activate the option to back up to Google drive they do say that anything backed-up to Drive "is not protected by WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption", but whether that means you could access them other than via WhatsApp I do not know.

Biffos · Sep 20, 2020

So the "easiest" way seems to be just doing it manually by dragging and dropping the images, videos directly from the real WhatsApp chat.one by one. To find the corresponding media of a chat in the /sdcard/WhatsApp/Media might be very difficult.

OK, I will see how it looks like on Google drive, whether the data are encrypted or not / usable for me.

Very odd that there is no such option to export / copy, but obviously nobody wants to copy a chat and / or all the media / files of a chat.

Hadron · Sep 20, 2020

Well if I want to keep the media I don't necessarily want them together with the chat: usually it's the images themselves that matter more to me. And WhatsApp are hardly the first outfit to keep their data (by which I mean chats + media together) within their app and not care about the ability to export it including associations and formatting to something else.

Though I'd think that if you copied the media folder to a computer and viewed them with a file viewer that shows previews (thumbnails), then look at those on a bigger screen while looking at the chat on a phone you could probably select a lot of the images from a chat pretty efficiently.

Biffos · Sep 20, 2020

Yes, I understand. There are events having special groups / chats (for a single event only), not a person. So that is why it would be good if the media could be assigned to the special event.

Yes, I will try it with an image viewer or such, many thanks.

Or may be I could use the option to archive a single chat and then just opy the archive.

Thank you very much!

Hadron · Sep 21, 2020

I'm not sure what the "archiving" actually does. I think it hides it from the list of chats (which I don't care about: old, unused chats fall down the list anyway so don't really get in my way), but I'm not sure what else (if anything) it actually does.

Biffos · Sep 21, 2020

Yes, may be "archiving" is the same (done manually) what WhatsApp does with old messages / media, they just disappear from the chat until a new message / media is created, then they are shown again (re-done.by pressing manually that archive option).

Just copying / synchronizing the WhatsApp folders seems to work quite well.

How can I copy / export a complete chat (with all media / files) to the Notebook?

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