How to export a WhatsApp chat longer than the 40,000-message limit
WhatsApp will only hand over 40,000 messages without media, or 10,000 with media attached, counting backwards from your most recent message. Everything older is silently dropped — no warning, no note in the file. The fix does not need software: you archive forward in slices, exporting the chat repeatedly and deleting nothing, or you accept the cap and export the years you care about.
The two caps, and which one you are hitting
| Export type | Message cap | What you get | Who hits it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Without media | 40,000 | A single .txt file | Long text-heavy chats — a decade of daily messaging |
| With media (“Attach Media” / “Include media”) | 10,000 | .zip containing the .txt plus photos, voice notes and short videos | Almost everyone. Two years of an active couple's chat can pass 10,000. |
Both counts run backwards from today. So the messages you lose are always the oldest ones — which, for a book, are usually the ones that matter most. That asymmetry is the whole problem.
The honest answer about “unlimited export” apps
Search this question and the first page is desktop software promising to lift the cap. Most of them work by reading your phone’s local WhatsApp database over USB, which means installing a paid tool and giving it your entire message history. Some of them are fine. All of them are a bigger decision than the problem deserves. Before you spend anything, try the two free routes below — for most people one of them is enough.
Route one: export in slices, from now on
This is the only genuinely free way to beat the cap, and it works because the cap counts backwards. Each export overlaps the last, and the overlap is what lets the pieces be joined.
- Export with media todayYou will get the most recent ~10,000 messages. Note the date of the oldest message in the file — that is your high-water mark. Do not delete anything from WhatsApp; deleting does not extend the export, it just loses messages.
- Export again without mediaSame chat, second export, this time choosing Without media. Now you get 40,000 messages of text — four times as far back. You lose the photos for that older stretch but you keep every word.
- Keep both files, labelled by date
2026-08-with-media.zipand2026-08-text-only.txt. You now have the recent years in full colour and the older years in text. That is a complete book with a photo-rich second half, which is honestly how most long chats read anyway. - Repeat every six monthsFrom here on, one export twice a year keeps you permanently inside the cap. Ten minutes a year buys you a complete archive forever. Set a calendar reminder — this is the single most useful thing on this page.
Route two: decide the cap is fine
Worth saying plainly, because nobody selling recovery software will: 10,000 messages with every photo and voice note attached is a large book. At the density Kept in Print typesets, that is comfortably into the hundreds of A5 pages — see how many pages a chat becomes for the arithmetic. If your goal is a gift rather than a forensic archive, the most recent 10,000 messages with the media intact usually makes a better object than 40,000 messages of undecorated text.
Putting the pieces back together
If you do end up with several exports, they overlap — the same messages appear at the end of one file and the start of the next. Kept in Print reads the timestamps rather than the file boundaries, so you can build a book per slice and have them bound as a matching, numbered set; past roughly 350 pages a single chat is split into numbered volumes anyway, because a 600-page perfect-bound brick will not open flat and will crack at the spine.
Questions people actually ask
Is the limit 40,000 or 10,000?
Both. Exporting without media gives you up to 40,000 messages as a plain .txt. Exporting with media gives you up to 10,000, because the zip also has to carry the photos, voice notes and videos. Choosing 'without media' is the cheapest way to reach further back.
Which messages do I lose — the newest or the oldest?
The oldest. The count runs backwards from your most recent message, so an over-long chat is trimmed at the beginning. There is no warning and no marker in the file where the cut happened.
Will deleting old messages let me export more?
No, and it will cost you the messages. The cap is on how many the export writes out, not on how many exist. Deleting only makes your history shorter.
Does clearing the chat and restoring a backup help?
No. A restored chat is still one chat with the same number of messages, and the same cap applies to the export. Backups and exports are different mechanisms entirely.
Can Kept in Print read more than WhatsApp gives me?
No, and nobody honest can. We only ever see the file WhatsApp writes. If WhatsApp truncated it at 10,000 messages, that is what arrives here. What we can do is tell you the exact count for free before you pay anything, so you find out now rather than after printing.
Find out what your export actually contains.
Count it — freeThis is one of the guides — or see everything we’ve written.