How do I export my iMessage chat for legal purposes?

Seeking Advice Forum
1

Hi

I am looking to take a 500 message plus iMessage chat for legal/documentation purposes but I cannot find an easy way to do so. Does anyone know how to do without using a third party app? WhatsApp does this in a few seconds and I’m just not sure what I am missing on the iMessage piece!

thanks!

2

I don’t know how on the iPhone directly but if you have something that runs MacOS you can do it on that

3

Here are your options!

4

Not sure but I think you used to be able to print from the Mac app

Edit: not sure if this still works but worth a shot.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254119213?sortBy=rank

5

If it’s for legal purposes you will not mind shelling out a few bucks for iMazing https://imazing.com/transfer-iphone-text-messages-to-computerhttps://imazing.com/transfer-iphone-text-messages-to-computer

6

I don’t think you can unless you have a Mac? If not you need to use a third party app. Try Picsew

7

The only option I can think of is by taking screenshots since you are only using an iPhone and not a Mac.

8

Try Apple’s website under data and privacy. I was able to get links to download all of my iCloud data and messages was one of them. It takes a few days for them to send you the link. (Maybe not if it’s just messages) I did all photos.

9

@Kitt
Why does apple make getting your own stuff such a pain

10

Harlan said:
@Kitt
Why does apple make getting your own stuff such a pain

Part of the garden, then you can’t import it into something else and leave

11

Honestly screenshots are probably your best bet. Apple doesn’t make this easy.

The other sort of hack is to start the process of forwarding them. Hold your finger on the first message and choose “More”. Then tap each message you want to include. Then tap the forward button. All the messages will be put into the message composer on separate lines, but with no names or timestamps. So copy that entire text block into Notes, or email it to yourself, and then manually add in the names and a heading for the date whenever it changes. Don’t forget you can use shorthand for the names at the start of each line, and then use find/replace to fix it.

12

There’s documentation for the schema for the SQLite tables it uses for storage with the Messages app on MacOS. It’s trivial to write a program to extract the data. I wrote a nice script to extract all of the text to Elasticsearch to search in less than an afternoon.

13

There’s some software I bought that allows you to upload all your texts from your phone to your computer.

I’m at work right now, if you can’t find it with Google I’ll send it to you later

14

iMazing — it’s designed for courtrooms