Guide
Snapchat Memories out of order after export? Here's the fix
You exported your Snapchat Memories, opened the folder, and the timeline is scrambled — old moments stacked next to brand-new ones, or all of them collapsed onto the day you imported. Nothing is lost. The dates simply never made it into the files, so your photo app has nothing to sort by. Putting those dates back rebuilds the chronology.
Why do exported memories come out in the wrong order?
Your photo app sorts by the capture date stored inside each file, and Snapchat's export leaves that field blank. A normal camera writes the date and time into every photo's EXIF metadata and every video's QuickTime atoms; Snapchat doesn't. Instead it keeps the real capture date and GPS for every memory in a single memories_history.json manifest and ships the media files with empty metadata. With no date to read, your library falls back to the only timestamp it can find — usually the file's modified date or the moment you imported — which is why years of memories collapse onto one recent day or land in a jumbled order.
How does restoring the real dates fix the order?
Restoring the capture dates fixes ordering across days, which is the part that actually matters for a chronological library. SnapMemories reads memories_history.json, finds the original capture date for each memory, and writes it into the file: EXIF DateTimeOriginal for photos and the QuickTime creation-date atoms for videos. Once every file carries its own real date, your photo app rebuilds the timeline on its own — a 2018 memory sits in 2018, a 2023 one in 2023, and your years sort themselves back into place. Walk through the mechanics in how it works, or jump straight to fixing the timestamps.
The honest limit: order within a single day
We restore the correct date reliably, but we won't pretend to do more than the export allows. Snapchat's media-included export groups memories by day and does not provide a per-item time-of-day join key inside that day. So if you captured five memories on the same afternoon, the date will be correct on all five, but the exact minute-by-minute order among them can't always be perfectly reconstructed — the data to do so simply isn't in the export. In practice this is rarely noticeable: your library is right to the day, which is what makes albums, "On This Day," and year scrubbing work again.
What about big exports split into multiple zip parts?
Large libraries don't arrive as one file — Snapchat splits them into several mydata~*.zip parts, and the memories_history.json manifest lives in only one of them while the media and HTML are spread across all of them. SnapMemoriesstitches the parts back together, matches every file to its manifest entry, and applies the right date and location regardless of which part a file came from. Whether you run it in the browser or in the desktop app, the result is the same corrected timeline, ready to import in order.
Frequently asked questions
- Why are my Snapchat Memories all in the wrong order after exporting?
- Snapchat leaves each photo and video's own date field blank in the export, so your gallery sorts them by the day you imported them instead of when you took them. The real capture dates live in memories_history.json, not in the files. Writing those dates back into each file restores the correct chronological order across days.
- Will fixing the dates put every memory in perfect order?
- It puts them in the correct order across days — a 2019 memory before a 2022 one, and so on. Within a single day, Snapchat's media-included export groups memories by date but gives no per-item timestamp join key, so the exact minute-by-minute order of several memories captured on the same day can't always be reconstructed. The day is right; the second-level order within that day may not be.
- Do I need to re-import everything into my photo library?
- Yes — fix the files first, then import the corrected copies. Most apps (Apple Photos, Google Photos) lock to the date they read at import, so re-sorting after the fact is painful. Running your export through the fix before importing means everything lands on the right timeline the first time.
- Does this also fix videos showing up at the wrong time?
- Yes. Videos lose their dates the same way photos do, and they also lose location. The fix writes the QuickTime creation-date atoms so videos sort correctly alongside your photos, plus the QuickTime Keys:GPSCoordinates atom Apple Photos specifically needs to place a video on the map — something most other tools can't write.