Snapchat export: merge the separate overlay files (Beta)

Why captions come out as separate files

Snapchat keeps a snap's caption, stickers, drawing or location filter on a layer of its own. The data export hands you the layers separately instead of the finished snap: next to 2023-05-15_CFFD7A68-…-main.jpg sits 2023-05-15_CFFD7A68-…-overlay.png, a transparent picture with only the caption on it. Videos get the same kind of overlay. Photo apps show just the bare photo, and the overlay as a mostly empty picture of its own.

How the overlays are merged

1. Upload the mydata~….zip parts of your export (the overlays are in the memories folders).
2. Each -main file is paired with its -overlay file by name.
3. Photos are decoded at full size and upright, the overlay is scaled to the photo (Snapchat saves it at the screen's size, for example 1080 × 2034 for a 1019 × 1920 photo) and drawn on top, and the photo is saved once as a high-quality JPEG (PNG screenshots stay PNG).
4. Videos are re-encoded once with the overlay drawn on every frame, in their own size and the right way up, with the sound copied.
5. The date, time zone and place from memories_history.json are written into the merged file, and the file is named by date.

Options

• Merge (default): the finished snap, as it looked in the app.
• Merge, and also keep the original: the merged file plus …-original.jpg without the caption.
• Keep them separate: the original untouched and the overlay PNG next to it, both dated.

Good to know

• Photos and videos without an overlay are not re-encoded at all.
• Re-encoding videos takes time. In a very large export the job merges captions into videos while its time allows; the others keep their caption as a separate PNG and the result page tells you how many. Fixing the export in batches (a few parts at a time, with memories_history.json) gets them all merged.
• Split videos with captions are merged part by part and then joined into one video.

More about what this tool reads and writes: Snapchat Memories Export Fixer.