These are my notes on using WhatsApp.

Table of Contents

Bulk Media Download

WhatsApp is often used for group trips and holidays, and people post their photos to the group chat. There doesn’t seem to be any easy way to download all the photos from a WhatApp chat to a directory on a PC (e.g. my photos collection).

WhatsApp Android

Copying Media Directories

On my current Android phone, WhatsApp stores downloaded media in these directories:

This PC\<phone>\Internal storage\Android\media\com.whatsapp\WhatsApp\Media\WhatsApp Images\Private
This PC\<phone>\Internal storage\Android\media\com.whatsapp\WhatsApp\Media\WhatsApp Video\Private

Previously it stored them in different directories:

This PC\<phone>\Internal storage\WhatsApp\Media\WhatsApp Images
This PC\<phone>\Internal storage\WhatsApp\Media\WhatsApp Video

Pros:

Straightforward to copy files from these directories to a PC via USB transfer.
Filenames include date and time.

Cons:

You need to ensure the media is downloaded before copying. The only way to do this seems to be to scroll through the chat, ensuring that photos are fully visible, and clicking on any “download” icons (usually showing file size) on photos or videos.
The directories contain all downloaded media from all chats – there’s no easy way to select files from individual chats.

Export Chat

WhatsApp has an Export Chat option with an “Include Media” option, which seems like it should solve the issue. Unfortunately it seems to restrict the total exported data to a very small size. In my case it only included 3 image files.

In theory the Export Chat is also available in WhatsApp Web and WhatsApp Windows, but I couldn’t find it in either one.

WhatsApp Web

Media – Download

In WhatsApp Web => <Chat> => Group Info => Media, docs and links => Media tab, you can select multiple files and click the Download icon to download them. However the Download icon disappears once you select more than about 23 files, making it useless for large numbers of photos. (You also need to select each file manually, although you can press Tab and Space repeatedly to do this.)

Media – ImageEye extension

In Chrome, install the ImageEye Image Downloader, then go to the Media tab (see above) and scroll to the bottom to ensure all images are loaded. Finally, use the ImageEye button to download all images.