How to export a WhatsApp chat on iPhone

Steps to export a chat on iPhone

1. Open WhatsApp and go into the chat you want to export — an individual or a group.
2. Tap the contact name or group name at the top of the screen. This opens the Contact Info or Group Info screen.
3. Scroll down. Past the shared media, groups-in-common and settings, you'll find Export Chat near the bottom, usually just above Block or Report.
4. Tap Export Chat. You'll be asked to choose “Attach Media” or “Without Media.” Attach Media bundles every photo, video and voice note into a .zip; Without Media produces a plain .txt with placeholder text like “<attached: 00000123-PHOTO.jpg>” where each attachment was.
5. iOS opens the share sheet. Choose Save to Files (recommended) so the export lands somewhere you can find it again — pick On My iPhone or iCloud Drive and a folder you'll remember. You can also AirDrop it to a Mac, or email it to yourself as an attachment, which works fine for smaller chats but Mail sometimes compresses or truncates very large attachments.
6. For a very active chat with years of history and lots of photos, exporting and zipping can take a couple of minutes — the app doesn't always show a progress bar, so give it time before assuming it's stuck.

What the exported file looks like

A WhatsApp .txt export on iPhone uses a format like [31/12/2023, 21:41:05] Sarah: See you at 6. Every line starts with the date and time in square brackets, then the sender's name, then the message. Multi-line messages continue on the following line without a new timestamp, which is normal.

One iPhone-specific quirk worth knowing: iOS often inserts invisible Unicode direction-control characters (like left-to-right or right-to-left marks) around the timestamp. You won't see them in a normal text editor, but they can trip up naive parsers or make the file look subtly different from an Android export of the same conversation. Chat to Evidence strips these automatically when it reads the file.

If you chose Attach Media, the share sheet gives you a .zip instead of a bare .txt. Inside are the chat text file plus every photo and video, each named to match the placeholder reference in the text — for example IMG-20231231-WA0007.jpg.

Turning the export into a PDF

Once the file is saved, go to chattoevidence.com and drop the .txt or .zip onto the page — nothing uploads, the conversion happens in your browser. See WhatsApp chat to PDF for the full walkthrough, or WhatsApp chat to PDF with images if you exported with media and want the photos embedded rather than shown as placeholders.

If you need the transcript for a court matter or a dispute, start with WhatsApp chat to PDF for court, which covers exhibit labeling, pagination and what to keep alongside the PDF.

Common problems

• Export Chat is missing from the menu — make sure you're in Contact/Group Info, not the chat's overflow menu, and confirm you have the latest version of WhatsApp from the App Store.
• The file won't save to Files — try AirDrop to yourself or email as a fallback; both produce the identical .txt or .zip.
• The exported .zip won't open on iPhone — that's expected; iOS doesn't need to unzip it. Just upload the .zip as-is to chattoevidence.com and it will read the contents directly.
• Only recent messages appear — very old chats that were never backed up locally, or messages that predate a phone restore, may be missing regardless of export settings.