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Snapchat Memories export problems, solved

Updated July 22, 2026

You unzip your Snapchat export and every photo is dated today, whether it's from last week or 2018. Or there are no photos in it at all, just a page of links. Neither means Snapchat lost anything: the real dates and the real files are usually still there, just not where your photo app looks for them.

Both are the export doing exactly what it was built to do, just not in a way any photo app expects. Here are the four problems people run into most after downloading a Snapchat export, what actually causes each one, and what your real options are, including doing nothing at all.

Every photo is dated the day you downloaded it, not the day you took it

Open one of the photos in Windows Explorer or Finder and check its date, and you'll almost always see the day you ran the export, not the day you took the picture. The files themselves only carry one date stamp: the moment they were written to disk during export. The real date, the real time, and often the location are recorded separately, in a plain text file in your export called memories_history.json.

You can open that file yourself in any text editor or browser. It's a long list of entries, one per memory, each one tying a file name to when it was taken and, often, where. Scrolling through it is a good way to confirm your actual history is intact, even before you decide how to fix anything.

There's a distinction buried in here that trips a lot of people up. The date shown in Finder or Explorer isn't the same thing as the “date taken” that Google Photos, Apple Photos, or Amazon Photos sort by. Those apps read a separate field embedded inside the file itself; for photos it's called EXIF. Manually changing a file's system date in Get Info or Properties does nothing to that internal field, so your library will keep sorting the file into today no matter what you change at the file level.

If you're comfortable with a command line, a tool like exiftool can write real dates into files, but you'd still need to match each file to its correct entry in memories_history.json yourself, by hand or with a script you write. For a few dozen photos that's a reasonable afternoon project. For years of Snapchat history it usually isn't, and that's exactly what Snapchat Memories Fixer handles: it reads that same list and writes the dates and locations back into the files for you.

And if none of this bothers you enough to fix, that's a legitimate choice too. Your photos are still there and still viewable, just clustered onto one day in your library instead of spread across the real timeline.

Nothing is lost. It's just disorganized.

Your export only has links, not actual photos and videos

Sometimes the zip Snapchat sends you is suspiciously small, a few hundred kilobytes for supposedly years of daily snaps. Open it and instead of jpg and mp4 files, you find an HTML page or a JSON file full of web addresses. That's not a glitch. It's what happens when the “Include your Memories, Chat Media and Shared Stories” checkbox wasn't ticked when you requested your data: you get a record that memories exist, not the memories themselves.

Don't waste time trying to script around this by hitting those links directly. They're time-limited links sitting on Snapchat's own servers, and browsers don't let a page like this one fetch them on your behalf, so a batch downloader won't get far and clicking through thousands of them one at a time isn't realistic either. The only real fix is going back to Settings, then My Data, and requesting your export again with that box actually checked. Snapchat emails you again once the new export is ready, and that can take anywhere from a few minutes to a full day depending on how much you have stored.

Captions and stickers show up separated from the photo

If you added text, a sticker, or a doodle to a snap, look closely at your export and you'll usually find two files for it instead of one: the original photo, and a second image that looks almost blank or checkerboard-transparent when you open it normally. That second file is the caption, saved by Snapchat as its own see-through layer rather than baked into the photo.

Import both files as-is into a photo library and you get a normal photo sitting next to what looks like a glitchy, empty duplicate, which clutters your timeline and confuses anyone scrolling through it. If you don't care about the captions, the simplest move is deleting the transparent overlay files and keeping the base photos. If the export also left you with actual duplicate photos scattered through the folder, something like Duplicate Photo Finder can find those separately, exact copies and near-identical shots alike.

If you do want the caption visible on the photo, you have two paths: open the photo and its overlay together in any image editor and flatten them into one image yourself, one at a time, or use a tool that automates the merge. Either way, merging bakes the text and stickers permanently into the pixels. There's no getting the clean photo back afterward unless you kept a separate copy first.

Videos still land on the wrong day even after your photos look right

This one catches people off guard because it looks like a partial success. You fix your photos, import them, and everything sorts correctly. Then you import the videos and they're all still dumped on the export date.

The reason is that video files don't store their date the same way photos do. Photos carry it in a metadata format called EXIF. Video containers like MP4 and MOV store their own date fields in the file's header, separate from EXIF entirely, and different apps read different fields inside that header depending on how they were built. A metadata tool made mainly for photos can patch a photo's EXIF correctly and simply skip, or only half-fix, a video's own internal date field. The file plays back fine; it just still reports the wrong day.

The practical fix is checking that whatever method you use explicitly claims to handle video files, not just photos, since plenty of general-purpose metadata editors are photo-only under the hood. Snapchat Memories Fixer writes the real date and location into videos the same way it does for photos, which is worth checking for in any tool you're evaluating rather than assuming “restores dates” automatically covers both.

Whatever you decide to do with any of this, do it before you delete the original export zip. Once that's gone, whatever dates you've already written into your files are the only record of the real ones left.