How to record a WhatsApp chat and view it later like in the app

If you are planning on quitting WhatsApp to go to another messaging app, you might want to put all of your chats in a safe place first so that they aren’t lost forever. WhatsApp allows you to export chats from the app, although it does so in a very basic way, with a TXT file without any format and the photos and stickers separately.

If you want to have a copy of a WhatsApp chat and make it look like WhatsApp, you can still take an elongated screenshot, although in long conversations the result can be monstrous and not able to search for text. Today we tell you how you can view and print your exported chats so they appear almost identical to WhatsApp’s.

First, export the chat as usual

In the past, WhatsApp did not securely encrypt the backup with the database with chats, so it was possible to use apps like Backup Text for WhatsApp to read directly from the database and export chats to HTML, PDF, CSV or similar

. These apps don’t work anymore and the closest thing these days, WaTweaker, requires root and at the moment has no export or import enabled.

With this scenario, users who want to keep their chats basically have two options. The first one, use whatsapp export, a process that we have told you about several times. To do this, you need to tap the ⋮ menu button in a chat and then tap More and finally in Export chat.

So you have to choose if you want include media files (photos, videos, voicemail messages, stickers, animated GIFs) of the conversation or not, as well as to which application you want to send everything. You can use Gmail, to create an email with all attachments, Google Drive, to download all files, or any other application you want.

We said earlier that there are two options, so what’s the second? Use a unofficial tool to export chats from WhatsApp Web like this extension for Google Chrome. It works well, although the resulting file (in JSON format) isn’t easy for you to refer to later either, so it doesn’t have much advantage over the official WhatsApp export.

Then use a free online viewer

WhatsApp exports chats as TXT file per conversation and lots of additional files for photos, stickers, etc. They are not very pretty to see, but luckily there are free tools like Chat Viewer, available here, to resolve the ballot. It is basically an online viewer to view WhatsApp exported TXT files beautifully.

The use is very simple, because all you have to do is press Choose the folder and choose the TXT file that WhatsApp exported. The web can be accessed on mobile, although it is a bit claustrophobic. If you are using it on a PC, you must first send yourself the exported chat TXT file in order to open it.

For the rest, there is not much else to configure, except choose who is the protagonist of the cat

in the drop-down menu, which is populated with the names of the participants. The person you choose here will be the one represented by a green bubble, and the others will have a white bubble.

Impulse Start replay and the web will start to process the chat. Keep in mind that if you have loaded a very long chat it may take a long time to finish processing, very similar to how it would be viewed in WhatsApp. There is one downside though, which is that photos, stickers, or voice clips aren’t included in the preview, at least for now.

Unfortunately, the app does not allow you to save the result in HTML format – and it will be difficult for you to do so by force from the browser unless you have advanced knowledge – although you can print a conversation easily by clicking Print cat view.

The cat print more or less keeps the viewer format – if you choose to keep the background images – meaning you can use this trick to save chat as PDF as backup more readable than WhatsApp TXT.