Rescue your Snapchat Memories before they expire
The photos and videos behind years of Memories, saved as ordinary files you can open anywhere, rather than links that stop working.
Why bother
Memories are the part of Snapchat people care about years later, and the part most likely to be lost. They are delivered as time-limited links rather than files.
What actually goes wrong
- Snapchat is the slowest of them
- The export can take up to 30 days, and there is no queue position to watch. Request it the day you decide to do this, not the day you have time.
- Memories are the part worth having
- Snaps you saved to Memories come back as real files with real dates. The rest of the export is mostly JSON - chat history, location history, friends - which is interesting but is not what you came for.
- The same pictures are probably in your camera roll too
- Anything you saved to your phone as well as to Memories will already be in a Google or Apple export. Open them together and the duplicate pass will spot it rather than leaving you two copies.
Ask Snapchat for your data
Free, and required by law - but it takes hours to days, and Snapchat emails you when it is ready, so start it now and come back. The full guide has the steps and the traps.
Open it in your browser
Drop the archive into Muletto. It is read on your own machine - nothing is uploaded - and you get a timeline, your pictures, your conversations and a map of where you have been. Open several exports together and they merge into one library.
Large archives are fine. They are read in pieces rather than loaded whole, so size is not the limit it usually is in a browser.
Clean it up before you move it
This is the step worth not skipping, because it is far easier now than once the files are spread across a disk.
- Duplicates across services. The same photo backed up to two places is one photo. Muletto finds byte-identical copies and near-copies - a burst, a crop, a re-save - and you choose what a tidied library keeps.
- Dates that got lost. Exports routinely strip the capture date, so everything looks like it was taken the day you downloaded it. Muletto reads the real date back out and writes it into the file itself.
- Places. Where the coordinates survived, they are written back in too, so whatever you import into can put things on a map.
Put it on External drive
Muletto writes the tidied library straight out - into dated folders on a drive or a network share, or as a single archive. You choose the arrangement, and it writes an index of everything it wrote.
The destination guide covers the part that happens at the other end.
When it is done
The photos and videos behind years of Memories, saved as ordinary files you can open anywhere, rather than links that stop working.
Check it worked. Check the memories are dated when they were taken rather than when Snapchat handed them over, then put the drive somewhere that is not your desk drawer.
Keep the work file Muletto offers at the end. Export again next year and it recognises everything that carried over, so none of this has to be done twice.