Skip to content

How to export Telegram chat history

Updated 16 October 2026

Telegram's export lives in the desktop app. Choose the machine-readable JSON format and you can open the result anywhere.

Open your Telegram export

Export one chat

The mobile apps cannot export chats, so install Telegram Desktop on Windows, macOS or Linux and sign in.

  1. 1Open the chat in Telegram Desktop.
  2. 2Click the three dots in the top right corner and choose Export chat history.
  3. 3Untick media types you do not need to keep the export small.
  4. 4Set Format to Machine-readable JSON.
  5. 5Click Export and open the folder when it finishes. It contains result.json.

Export everything

Settings, Advanced, Export Telegram data exports all chats at once. Choose JSON again. chatview opens the full export and lets you pick a chat.

Read it

Drop result.json, or the export folder as a .zip, into chatview to read it as chat bubbles, search it and export a PDF or Excel file.

Questions

Should I choose HTML or JSON?

Choose JSON. HTML is made for reading in a browser, while JSON keeps every message as structured data that tools can open.

Ready when you are

Open your export in seconds. Free, private, no account.

Open your Telegram export