WhatsApp export: "Include Media" or "Without Media", and how to choose in ten seconds
A field guide to the two options in WhatsApp's export dialog: what each one actually produces, why the file extension you get back cannot be trusted, and which choice fits which goal.
The two options, stripped down
"Without Media" gives you the conversation as text. Every message keeps its timestamp, its sender name and its body. Every photo, voice note, video, sticker, PDF and location pin is replaced with a single placeholder line where the attachment used to sit.
"Include Media" gives you the same text file plus the actual attachment files, bundled together in an archive. On iOS the export usually arrives as a zip containing a file named _chat.txt alongside the media. That naming detail matters mostly because people go looking for a file named after the contact and do not find one.
There is no third option hiding in the menu. Everything else you might want, date range, specific participants, is not something WhatsApp lets you choose at export time.
What changes in the file you actually get
Size is the difference you feel first. "Without Media" stays in the low megabytes even for a chat with tens of thousands of messages, because a year of photos collapses into a few thousand short placeholder lines. "Include Media" scales with your attachments, so a heavy group chat can turn into an archive that is awkward to move between apps, email to yourself or upload on a mobile connection.
The text itself is identical in both cases. This is the part most people get wrong: choosing "Without Media" does not thin out your conversation. Nothing is summarised, nothing is truncated, no messages are dropped. You lose the binary files, not the record of them.
Because the placeholder line survives, the export still tells you that an attachment existed, when it was sent and who sent it. That is enough to reconstruct an attachment breakdown: how many photos versus voice notes, who sends more of them, which weeks were heavy. Our media vault and "media omitted" write-ups cover how that placeholder is read line by line.
Zip or txt, and why the extension lies
Searching for "zip vs txt" implies the two are alternatives you pick between. They are not. The archive is just packaging. What matters is the chat text inside it, and any tool worth using should accept either and figure it out.
On our side the check is deliberately not based on the filename. The parser reads the first bytes of the file and looks for the zip signature, then unpacks and hunts for the chat text inside. The reason is boringly practical: Android share sheets and file pickers routinely ignore the accept attribute a web page declares, and routinely hand back a file whose name and declared type do not match its contents. A real zip arrives labelled .txt, a plain text file arrives labelled as something generic, and a filter based on the extension would reject perfectly good exports while accepting broken ones.
So if your export came out as export.txt and opening it shows gibberish, or came out as _chat.txt inside a zip you cannot easily unpack on your phone, neither is a problem to solve before uploading. Hand over whatever WhatsApp gave you.
Choose by goal, not by instinct
You want statistics, a recap, counts, reply times, a wrapped. Choose "Without Media". It uploads in seconds, parses fast, and gives up nothing that a message count, a word count, a streak or a reply time calculation needs. Timestamps and sender names are the whole raw material.
You want an archive you can still browse in five years, with the pictures. Choose "Include Media", and treat it as cold storage rather than something you pass through apps. Then, if you also want the numbers, run a second "Without Media" export for that purpose. Two exports of the same chat cost you nothing.
You are on a slow connection, a nearly full phone, or a group chat with years of video. "Without Media" is the only option that will reliably finish. Large archives are where exports stall, fail to attach, or arrive incomplete.
You are exporting someone else's group chat and thinking about privacy. "Without Media" is the more conservative choice by a wide margin: you are carrying text you already had in your own app, not copies of other people's photos.
Field notes: the small things that trip people up
The export lands in a share sheet, not in a folder. WhatsApp hands the file straight to another app, so decide where it goes before you tap. Sending it to yourself in a note, a mail draft or your files app makes it findable again. Sending it to a random app and dismissing the sheet means exporting a second time.
Export from inside the chat, one chat at a time. There is no bulk option, and a group export includes every participant's messages, not just yours.
Attachment placeholders are worded differently across languages and platforms, which is why a tool that pattern matches only the English phrasing will silently report zero photos for a chat in Italian, Spanish or German. If your attachment counts come back suspiciously empty, that, and not your export choice, is usually the cause.
Deleted messages and system lines (someone joined, the group name changed, encryption notices) also survive in both export types. They are part of the text, so a good parser has to decide what to do with them rather than count them as ordinary messages.
The ten second answer
If you are exporting to analyse the chat, pick "Without Media", upload whatever file appears, and ignore its extension. If you are exporting to keep the photos, pick "Include Media" and store the archive somewhere permanent.
Everything the numbers depend on lives in the text, and the text is the same either way.
Frequently asked questions
Does exporting without media remove anything from my chat?+
No. An export is a copy, and the chat in your app is untouched. Choosing "Without Media" only means the copy contains the text of the conversation plus a placeholder line for each attachment, instead of the attachment files themselves.
Can I still see how many photos and voice notes were sent if I export without media?+
Yes. Each attachment leaves one placeholder line with its timestamp and sender, so counts, per person splits and time patterns for photos, voice notes and other attachments can all be reconstructed from the text alone.
My export came out as a .txt file but it looks unreadable. Is it broken?+
Probably not. Android pickers and share sheets often hand back a zip labelled with the wrong extension. Detection here reads the first bytes of the file instead of trusting the name, so a mislabelled archive is unpacked normally.
How big will the file be?+
Without media, a few megabytes even for tens of thousands of messages. With media included, the size depends entirely on your attachments and can become large enough to make uploading and sharing awkward.
Why is the chat text called _chat.txt?+
That is the name iOS uses inside the zip it produces when media is included. It is not named after the contact or group, so look for _chat.txt rather than a filename you recognise.