Why exported Snapchat Memories show the wrong date
The photos and videos in a Snapchat export carry no capture date of their own. When you copy them to a phone or upload them to Apple Photos or Google Photos, the app falls back to the file's time, which is the day you downloaded or unzipped the export. A few apps show a blank date as 1970 or 2052. The result: years of memories piled onto one day, in no useful order.
The real dates are not lost. Snapchat puts them in a list inside the export,
memories_history.json (or memories_history.html when JSON files were not requested), one
entry per memory with its date and time in UTC.
How the dates are put back
- Upload every
mydata~….zippart of your export together; the list is in the first part. - Each photo and video is matched to its entry: by the media ID in its name when the list has download links, otherwise by the capture time stored in the ZIP, or by date and order within the day. The list of memories in the result says how each file was matched.
- The date is written into the file: the EXIF capture date of photos, the movie header and Apple's creation date of videos, in the local time of the place where the memory was taken, with its UTC offset. Memories without a location get UTC (+00:00).
- Files are named by date and time,
2023-05-21_18-01-59_cffd7a68.jpg, and carry the capture time as their file time, so folders sort them too.
Photos and videos are not re-encoded for this: only the date (and the place) is added. Captions that Snapchat exported as separate overlay files are merged back, and videos split into parts are joined.
Pitfalls
- Upload all parts. Large exports come as several ZIPs. A part missing from the upload means missing memories; the result page counts the memories of the list that weren't found.
- Exports that don't record times in the ZIP can only be matched by date: the day is right, but two memories of the same day may swap times. The result page says when this happened.
- Time zones. A memory taken abroad keeps the local time of that place with its UTC offset, not the time at home, so its moment is exact wherever you look at it.
More about what this tool reads and writes: Snapchat Memories Export Fixer.