Chat Keeper

Turn a WhatsApp chat export into a clean, searchable archive, or a PDF with the photos inline. It all runs in your browser: nothing is uploaded.

Use it: kushagra21.github.io/chat-keeper

WhatsApp's "Export chat" gives you a .txt file and a pile of loose photos, videos and voice notes. Chat Keeper turns that into something you can read, search, print and keep: a chat with someone who has died, a family group before you change phones, or a record of a dispute.

Your chat stays on your device

• The site is a single static page on GitHub Pages. There is no server, account or analytics.
• The page reads your export with the browser's own file APIs. The file never leaves your computer or phone.
• The page's Content Security Policy sets connect-src 'none', so the browser blocks every network request it might try to make. The exported archives have the same rule.
• Check it yourself: load the page, turn off Wi-Fi, then open your export. It still works. Or watch the Network tab in your browser's developer tools: nothing goes out.
• Use it fully offline: download chat-keeper.html, one self-contained file, and open it from your disk.

What it does

• Reads any export: the .zip WhatsApp makes, or the chat .txt together with its media, or a whole folder. Works with iPhone and Android exports, in any language and region, with 12- or 24-hour times. Day/month or month/day is worked out from the dates; you can switch it if a short chat leaves it unclear.
• Shows the chat with photos, videos, voice notes, stickers and documents in place. Pick who "you" are to put your messages on the right.
• Search every message, filter by person, jump to a date, and browse all photos and videos in a gallery.
• Save an archive (.zip): an index.html that opens in any browser, offline; every file from the export, byte for byte; the original chat text; a manifest.json; and SHA256SUMS.txt.
• Save a single page (.html) with the photos inside it, for smaller chats.
• Print or save as PDF: the whole chat or a date range, as a dated transcript with photos and video stills inline and page numbers.
• Checksums for records: SHA-256 of the original export, the chat text and every file, in the archive and on the PDF's first page.

Checking an archive later

cd "Chat name (WhatsApp archive)"
shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS.txt

Every line should end in OK. The checksums show that the files haven't changed since the archive was made. They can't, on their own, prove where the original export came from. If a chat matters for a legal case, keep the original export and the phone too.

Limits

• WhatsApp limits how much one export can hold (roughly 10,000 messages with media, or 40,000 without, depending on the phone). That happens before Chat Keeper sees the file.
• Very large exports (several GB) work best in a desktop browser. The PDF is made by the browser's print dialog, so print long chats in date ranges.
• .opus voice notes play in Chrome, Edge and Firefox. Some browsers, older Safari in particular, can't play them; every voice note has a download link as well.
• Times are shown as written in the export, in the phone's time zone at the time. The export doesn't record the zone.

Develop

Needs Node 24.

npm install
npm run dev      # http://localhost:5173
npm test         # parser and export tests
npm run build    # dist/index.html, one self-contained file

• src/parser.ts reads the chat text. To add a format, add a line from a real export (with names changed) to src/parser.test.ts.
• src/loader.ts opens the zip or files and reads media only when it's needed.
• src/viewer/ is the chat view, used both by the app and inside every exported archive (src/archive-entry.ts, built first as build-archive/viewer.js).
• src/export.ts writes archives; src/viewer/print.ts lays out the PDF.
• scripts/make-sample.py builds the made-up sample chat.

Pushing to main runs the tests and deploys to GitHub Pages. What has and hasn't been tested so far is in docs/STATUS.md.

Licence

MIT. Chat Keeper is not affiliated with WhatsApp or Meta.