Guide
What's actually inside a Snapchat export? A guided tour of the files and folders
Unzip a Snapchat Memories export and you're met with a pile of HTML pages, JSON files, and media folders — and no obvious map of what does what. This is that map: what each part is for, and which files actually carry the dates and locations you'll want to put back so your photos and videos land in your library correctly.
What are the HTML files for?
The HTML files are a browsable index of your export. Snapchat includes one or more index pages so you can open the download in a web browser and click through your data — your memories, account info, and the rest — without any special software. They're genuinely useful for a quick look, but think of them as a table of contents, not the source of truth. The HTML lists your memories in roughly day order, which is part of how a tool reconstructs the sequence; the actual dates and locations it relies on come from the JSON, described next.
Which JSON files hold the real metadata?
One file does the heavy lifting: memories_history.json. It's a structured list with one entry per memory, recording the real capture date and time, the GPS location, and the media type — the exact information your photo library wants but can't find inside the files themselves. A Snapchat export usually contains other JSON files too (for account details, friends, chat history, settings and so on), but for the job of fixing dates and locations, memories_history.json is the one that matters. If you only keep one file from the whole export, keep that one — and for a closer look at how it's laid out inside, see our deep dive on the file.
Where are the actual photos and videos?
Your media lives in its own folders within the export, separate from the index pages and the JSON. Each photo and video sits there as a normal file you can open — but with its own metadata left blank: no capture date, no GPS, nothing your gallery can read. That's the whole problem in a nutshell: the pixels are in the media folders, the dates and GPS are in the JSON, and nothing in the export has joined the two together. Overlays — the captions, stickers and drawings you added — may also be present as separate layers, which is why a memory can look bare until those are merged back on.
Why is my export split across multiple zip parts?
Because libraries get big. Snapchat splits a large export into several numbered archives — mydata~*.zip, part 1 through k — rather than one enormous file. The catch is that memories_history.json appears in only one of those parts, while the media and HTML are spread across all of them. Miss a part and you're missing media; miss the part with the manifest and you've lost the dates and locations for everything. So download every part and keep the complete set together, zipped or unzipped. MemoriesExport reads the whole multi-part export, finds the single manifest wherever it is, and pairs it with media from every part.
So which files actually get used to fix your memories?
In practice, two things drive the fix: the JSON manifest for each memory's date and GPS, and the media files those values get written into. MemoriesExport reads memories_history.json, matches each entry to its photo or video, and writes the capture date into the file's own metadata — EXIF for photos, the QuickTime atoms for video, including the GPS atom Apple Photos needs to put a clip on the map. The HTML index helps order things; the other JSON files come along for the ride but aren't part of the repair. You don't have to sort or rename anything yourself — hand over the export as it came and let the tool do the joining. See how it works for the full pipeline. One honest caveat: because the media-included export groups memories by day without a per-item timestamp, the exact time-of-day order within a single day can't always be perfectly rebuilt — but the correct date and location are restored reliably.
Frequently asked questions
- Which file holds my memories' real dates and locations?
- memories_history.json. It's the only place the original capture date and GPS for each memory live — the photo and video files themselves are exported with blank metadata, which is why galleries show today's date and an empty map.
- Why are there several HTML files in my export?
- Snapchat ships human-readable index pages so you can browse the export in a browser. They're a convenient table of contents, but they aren't what restores metadata — the dates and GPS that get written back come from the JSON, not the HTML.
- My export is split into several zip files — is that normal?
- Yes. Large libraries arrive as multiple parts (mydata~*.zip, part 1 to k). The memories_history.json manifest appears in only one part, while media and HTML are spread across the rest. Keep every part — MemoriesExport handles the full multi-part set.
- Do I need to unzip and sort the files myself?
- No. You don't have to read or reorganise anything inside the export. You hand the export (zip parts or the unzipped folder) to MemoriesExport and it finds the manifest, matches it to your media, and writes the metadata back.