Whatsapp: Export pictures from certain conversations

Question

Whatsapp stores ALL media files within ONE huge folder, i.e. I've got about 6000 pictures in it, including much trash ;-)

Now I would like to extract/copy all pictures which were send between me and a specific contact (i.e. my girlfriend) to another folder so that I can transfer them on to my computer.

Do you know any way? Couldn't find anything when googeling as my keywords gave much too many hits.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Go to Whatsapp Settings. For me that the three dots button at the top right of "main" screen of whatsapp. From there go to chats, chat history, email chat, select contact, and it will prompt you to email it. You must say you want media files attached. If there are a lot of images it may fail.

Answer 2

I think there is no native way of doing that, and I have not seen any app that does it.

From my experience, the best way is via WhatsappWeb. I used this quite a few times.

1. Select the target conversation, on the left.
2. Click on the conversation name, at the top.
3. Expand Media.
4. Make sure all files are loaded, by scrolling/waiting.
5. Select all files you want.
6. You can Forward, Download, etc.

I found the same idea here.

Answer 3

WhatsApp doesn't want to give you this power (for legal reasons perhaps). The "export conversation" only exports most recent media. So I have elaborated a tidy 4-step solution to collect all media from a specific conversation group into my computer. Lets suppose you want the "Fishing Club" group media. Follow this steps:

1. Export the entire Whatsapp/Media folder to your computer (this may take a while).
2. Delete from your phone the entire set of media from the "Fishing Group" at once using WhatsApp's "Manage Storage" feature. For that, go to WhatsApp home screen, and navigate to the menu (⋮) > Settings > Data Storage > Manage Storage, find the group and delete all media from it.
3. Rename the Media folder in your machine to "Fishing Group", then repeat step one to backup a second copy of the entire Media folder again (but this time it won't have the media that is specific from that group, which you deleted in step two).
4. Now that you have the two copies side-by-side, use a file comparison tool in your computer to delete from the "Fishing Group" folder all unnecessary files which are also in the Media folder.

Done. Now the "Fishing Group" folder has only the medias which are from that specific conversation group. You may repeat steps 2-4 if you want to do the same thing with other conversation groups and free more space in your phone. When you are done, you can just delete the last Media folder copy if you wish.

Tip for the Mac OSX user:

• For the file export steps, use "Android File Transfer" app and connect to your phone via USB, activating file transfer mode In your Mac, then navigate to /Whatsapp folder and drag the entire Media folder to your machine.

Tip for the Linux/Unix/Mac user:

• To delete the duplicates (step 4) and also empty folders, you may just use this commands:

groupName="Fishing Group"

comm -12 \
<(cd "$groupName" && find . -iname "*" -type f | sort) \
<(cd Media && find . -iname "*" -type f | sort) \
| while read line; do rm "./$groupName/$line"; done

find "$groupName" -type d -exec rmdir {} 2>/dev/null \;

Tip for Windows user:

• To delete the duplicates try this commands (not tested):

cd Media
FOR /d /r %%f IN ("*.*") DO del "..\Fishing Club\%%f"
cd ..

By last, you may also want to export the full conversation into a text file by entering the group then nativate to menu (⋮) > More > Export Conversation. This can be exported to many formats, but in this case I like to export to a folder in the sd card using the "Send to SD card" App, then move them to my computer. The generated text file will have the names of the files from each media that was in that group. Contact cards will also be exported in .vcf format.

Answer 4

Ok, this does not answer the question directly, but comments on a feature that might be helpful to the same audience. This does not work for past media but for any new media from the moment you set it up.

How to sync whatsapp media for some conversations and not others?

1. You have to set for each conversation whether you want the media to be visible, that is, that the media goes to the whatsapp media folder or not.

   If you go to any conversation, once inside it,

   >> Three dots >> View contact/Group info >> Media visibility >> Yes/No
   

   Once you set that for all the conversations, you can sync the whatsapp photo and/or video folders, and only the ones set as visible will synchronize.

2. Of course having to do this for every conversation is not very handy.

   Most likely you want to sync everything but some conversations (as the groups where people send a lot of trash) or you want to sync only some conversations, like your girlfriend and family (where only pictures are being sent).

   If you are in either of these two cases, you can set the default visibility value,

   >> Settings >> Chats >> Media visibility >> Yes/No
   

   So you only have to change the ones you want/don't want to sync.