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I would like to export my chat histories from Telegram.

Their support wiki article describes how to do it by printing from web.telegram.org loaded in Google Chrome. However, this is undesirable for a few reasons:

  1. You have to load a whole chat manually using scroll-triggered ajax, which takes forever (potentially hours) on long chats.
  2. Emojis aren't included using this method (the article says they will be, but they're not).
  3. Only image thumbnails get included.

Is there another way, which gets a whole chat history, including emojis and images?

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2 Answers 2

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From 23-24/06/2018 Telegram added this option, as part of the GDPR changes.

Now you can request to download all you data:

  • Unfortunately it's not available yet (and not sure when) on the Telegram WebApp.
  • Other platforms support for Data Export:
    • Telegram Desktop - from 1.3.8 or higher
    • Telegram for Android - from 4.8.10 or higher
    • Telegram for iOS - from 4.8.3 or higher

You can message the @GDPRbot to request your data export.

Note: For security reasons, the data export is not immediate, so in case someone take control over one of your devices they won't be able to immediately download all your data.

Full notice from FAQ export:

Notice

Removing data on frequently messaged contacts and inline bots

To populate the ‘People’ box at the top of the Search section, Telegram calculates which of your chat partners you are likelier to message frequently. We calculate a similar rating for inline bots – thanks to that, the app can suggest you the bots you use frequently whenever you open the attachment menu (or start a new message with “@”).

We've implemented a way for you to remove this data from Telegram servers and stop Telegram from collecting it. It will become available in version 4.8.3 for iOS and version 4.8.10 for Android. Unfortunately, the update is still under review at the moment, but we expect it to become available in the nearest future.

Once you get the update, go to Settings > Privacy & Security and disable ‘Suggest Frequent Contacts’ to stop calculating ratings for contacts and inline bots, and delete all relevant data.

If you have other questions about data privacy, please use our @GDPRbot to contact Telegram's Data Protection Officer.

Demonstration from Telegram Desktop

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  • Yes! This works brilliantly. The files are named a little funkily and it doesn't include contacts' profile pics, but it does include, text, emojis, photos and stickers for all chats. Also, you have to wait 24 hours between request and download, but that's not too bad. Thanks!
    – Cai
    Jun 26, 2018 at 20:27
  • Also to mention: it can download in HTML or JSON format. With HTML, images and stickers are linked rather than embedded.
    – Cai
    Jun 26, 2018 at 20:36
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    Make sure to install Telegram Desktop, not a native Telegram for macOS (which doesn't support exporting).
    – kenorb
    Oct 7, 2019 at 19:55
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    This feature is under discussed for the native Telegram for macOS.
    – Franklin Yu
    Apr 28, 2020 at 16:28
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You can use telegram-history-dump.

Check out the configurations available for you, the default configuration doesn't include media:

The default configuration will backup all dialogs to a directory named output, in JSON format, without downloading any media.

Note: If you're using Windows, you can use it from the Linux Subsystem for Windows 10 - that's what I did.

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