How it works
Three steps, one of which is just waiting for Snapchat
Getting the export out of Snapchat is the fiddly part, so that step is here tap by tap, including the two switches that decide whether your archive contains any photos at all.
Ask Snapchat for your data
This is the longest step and the one nobody can hurry, because Snapchat builds the archive at its own pace and emails it when it's done. Your side of it takes about two minutes.
Every tap is below. Snapchat has rearranged this flow more than once, so these are drawn from the version that's live now rather than copied from an older guide. If what's on your screen doesn't match, look for the wording rather than the position.
- 1
Open Snapchat and tap your face, top-left
The camera screen is what opens first. Your Bitmoji (or a plain circle, if you've never made one) sits in the top-left corner of every screen in the app. Tap it. That's your profile.
- 2
Tap the gear, top-right
Your profile shows your name, your username and a row of buttons. The settings gear is in the opposite corner from the one you just tapped, top-right, next to the Share button.
- 3
Scroll a long way down to Privacy Controls, then tap My Data
Settings is long. You'll pass My Account at the top, then Public Profile Settings, then a whole section called Additional Services. None of that is what you want. Keep going until the heading Privacy Controls appears.
My Data is well down that section, below Family Center and Comment Settings and just above Generative AI Settings. Tapping it opens a web page rather than another settings screen, and it may ask you to log in again. That's normal.
- 4
Switch on “Export your Memories” and “Export JSON Files”
The page opens on a list headed Select data to include, with everything off and a counter reading 0 / 10 selected. Two of them matter.
“Export your Memories” is the photos and videos themselves. Without it you get a thorough archive of your account containing no pictures whatsoever, which is a long wait for nothing.
“Export JSON Files” is labelled “For data portability purposes”, which does it no favours. It's the file that holds every capture date, every set of coordinates, and the captions and stickers that were drawn on your memories. It's the half of the export this site actually reads. Turn it on.
There's also a blue “Request Only Memories” shortcut on this screen. It's quicker, but it doesn't let you confirm the JSON toggle, so use the two switches instead.
- 5
Leave the rest alone
Everything below those two is optional, off by default, and skipped by most people. They're a different kind of archive (logs and histories rather than photos), and each one you add makes the export bigger and slower to build. Turn them on only if you actually want them for something.
Then tap Next, bottom-right. For reference, the ones you're walking past are:
- User Information
- Chat History
- Spotlight
- Shopping
- Support History
- Ranking And Location
- Other Media
- Other
- My AI
- Export Shared Stories
- Export Chat Media
- 6
Choose All Time, check the email address, Submit
The second stage asks about a date range, and this is the step that quietly ruins exports. It offers Yesterday, Last Week, Last Month, Last Year, 2 Year and All Time. Pick All Time. Anything else and the memories from before that window simply aren't in the archive, and nothing on the page will warn you.
Below the calendar it shows the email address on your account. That's where the export gets sent: not to the app, not to your phone. If it's an address you can't open any more, fix that first, because the download link is the only copy you get.
Then Submit. The page moves to a third stage, Export progress, and tells you to wait before requesting anything else.
- 7
Wait. Usually a day or two
Snapchat builds these at its own pace. There's no queue position and no progress percentage worth watching. Snapchat says it aims to deliver within 7 days and that large downloads can take longer, though plenty arrive much sooner. Requesting it again doesn't speed it up; it just gets refused until the first one finishes.
Close the app. You'll get an email when it's ready.
- 8
Watch for “Your Snapchat data is ready for download”
That's the exact subject line, from Team Snapchat. Check spam if it's been a few days. It's a transactional email from a large sender and it does sometimes land there.
The email contains a link back to the same My Data page you started from.
- 9
Open Your exports instead of submitting a new request
This is where most people go wrong. The link drops you back on the My Data page, and the first thing you see is that same Select data to include list, looking exactly like it did when you started. Filling it in again just queues a second export and gets you nowhere.
What you want is the Your exports box above it. Your finished export is listed there, with a download for each package.
- 10
Download everything, quickly, then bring it here
Exports expire in about three days. After that the links are dead and you request the whole thing again from step one.
A large account won't arrive as one file. Snapchat splits big exports into several ZIPs, commonly a few of about 2GB each plus a smaller last one. Download all of them. A missing part means missing memories, and nothing tells you which.
Then drop the ZIP (or all of them together) onto the drop zone on the homepage. Don't unzip them first, and don't rename them.
Those are drawings, not screenshots. No real account appears in any of them. Snapchat moves this flow around every so often, so match the wording rather than the exact position on your screen.
Drop the ZIP in below
Don't unzip it first. The dates and coordinates live in a JSON file that has to be read alongside the photos, and pulling the archive apart by hand is the quickest way to separate them.
If Snapchat split your export into several ZIPs, drop all of them in together. They get treated as one export.
There is no upload step. The archive is opened and rewritten inside this browser tab, on your own machine. No account, no Snapchat login, no server, nothing sent anywhere. You can disconnect from the internet once the page has loaded and it will still work.
Big exports are happiest on a laptop or desktop with the tab left in front rather than in the background. Drop every ZIP in together, however many there are: only the first one holds your dates, so a ZIP run on its own comes out undated.
Get your memories back, dated
Every photo gets its real capture time written into EXIF (DateTimeOriginal, DateTimeDigitized and DateTime), which is the metadata Google Photos, Apple Photos, Immich and everything else read to decide where a picture belongs in your timeline. Coordinates go in too, where Snapchat's export makes it possible to tell which memory they belong to; where it doesn't, the field is left empty rather than filled with a guess. There is more on that below.
Captions, stickers, drawings and location filters all ship as one transparent PNG per memory, which is why exported photos look bare. That layer is composited back on at its own proportions (the overlay is the phone's screen, not the photo, so stretching it to fit would squash the text), and the result re-encoded. What comes out looks like what you posted.
Videos get the same treatment, the hard way. There is nowhere in an MP4 to put a picture, so the overlay has to become part of the frames: the video is decoded, the caption drawn onto every frame, and the whole thing encoded again, on your machine, with the audio copied across untouched. Videos have no EXIF, so the capture time goes into the MP4's own header instead (the field Apple Photos, iCloud and Google Photos read for a video's date), as well as into the filename.
Long videos that Snapchat cut into 10 second pieces are joined back into one. Each piece keeps a few hidden seconds of the one before it, so the order can be worked out by matching them up, on your machine, without re-encoding anything. Where the order isn't certain, the pieces are left as they are.
If your browser has no video encoder, nothing is thrown away: those captions land in a captions folder named to match their video. The summary at the end says which happened, and how many of each.
Files come out named by capture time, like 2019-04-02_09-15-30.jpg, in UTC, because UTC is the only thing Snapchat records. Alongside them you get keepmysnaps-index.csv listing every date and coordinate as plain text, in case you'd rather do something else with it.
You pick a folder before it starts and your fixed photos land in it as they are made, so there is nothing to unzip afterwards. You need room for your export twice while it runs, the original ZIPs plus the fixed photos, but only while it runs: once it's done the ZIPs can go. If your laptop or desktop is short on room, pick a folder on an external drive or a USB stick instead. And if it fills up partway, nothing is lost: it tells you which ZIP you can delete, and carries on. Point it at a Drive, iCloud or Dropbox folder and they back themselves up on the way past. Safari and Firefox get one ordinary ZIP instead, because neither will let a website write to a folder, which also means a run that stops starts over there. Either way it is not our business where it goes, which is rather the point.
That’s the whole thing
If your export has already arrived, the drop zone is waiting on the homepage.