After the fix
How do I keep Snapchat Memories out of my camera roll?
Updated
Put them in an album, and do it in the first minute after importing. This is easier than it sounds, but there is one catch people hit: once the real capture dates are back, the photos do not sit at the end of your library. They slot into 2017, 2019, wherever they were actually taken, which is the whole point of fixing them and also the reason they are hard to find afterwards. The Recently Added album is what saves you, because it sorts by when the phone received a photo rather than when it was taken.
The order that works
- 1. In Photos, open the Albums tab, tap the plus, New Album, and call it Snapchat Memories. Do this before you import anything.
- 2. Unzip the fixed ZIP in Files. Open the folder and check the dates look right on a few of them.
- 3. Select all the photos and videos in that folder, share, Save Images. They go into your library.
- 4. Go straight back to Photos and open Recently Added, in the Albums tab. Everything you just imported is sitting together there, whatever year it was taken.
- 5. Select, Add to Album, Snapchat Memories. Now they are in one place and also correctly dated in your timeline.
Why they scatter
Your photo library sorts by capture date, not import date. A broken export has every file stamped with the day you downloaded it, so importing it dumps eight years of Snapchat at the end of your camera roll in one block. That block is easy to find and completely wrong. A fixed export has the real dates back, so a photo from July 2017 goes and sits next to the other things you took in July 2017, which is what you wanted, and means there is no block to find later. Recently Added is the one view that still groups them, and it only holds them for a while.
If you would rather they stayed out of Photos entirely
You do not have to import them at all. The fixed folder is a normal folder of normal files. Leave it in Files, or move it to iCloud Drive, and it behaves like any other archive: searchable, backed up if iCloud Drive is on, and completely absent from your camera roll. The dates and captions are already written into the files, so nothing is lost by waiting. You can import them into Photos years later and they will still land in the right year. If you do want them in Photos properly, with faces and places working, there is a guide to that.
Two things not to import
The ZIP contains a CSV index of every memory and its real date. Keep it, do not import it, and it will not show up in Photos anyway. If some video captions could not be drawn back into their videos, they are saved as transparent PNGs in a captions subfolder. Leave that folder out of the import, or you will get a run of blank white rectangles in your album.
Android
Same idea, different app, and on Android you get an actual folder rather than an album. It has its own guide. The phone-only walkthrough for iPhone is here.
Fix the dates first
None of this works on a broken export, because every file carries the same date and the album is the only thing telling them apart. The first 500 files are free, so you can import a handful and see them land in the right year before doing the whole library.