Questions about Message Album

Yes. Without a licence, Message Album backs up the last 7 days of a conversation, with its photos, videos and voice notes, in exactly the format you get after buying. Those 7 days are measured from the conversation's newest message rather than from today, so a thread you stopped using years ago still keeps its final week. A partial album says so in three places you cannot miss: a file named INCOMPLETE BACKUP.txt sits in the folder, the album shows a banner when you open it, and transcript.md says so in its header. Buying removes the limit; back the same conversation up again and nothing is left out. Albums you already made stay readable whether or not you ever buy.

Neither. It is a one-time purchase. Updates within the current major version are included, and the albums you have already exported keep working with or without the app, because they are plain HTML, JSON and Markdown in an ordinary folder.

macOS protects ~/Library/Messages, and iPhone backups under ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup, from apps that have not been granted Full Disk Access. Without it, no app can read your conversations at all. You grant it once in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Full Disk Access, and you can revoke it whenever you like. The grant lets Message Album read those files; it does not send them anywhere. The app makes only two network requests: checking a licence key when you activate one, and asking whether an update exists.

No. Message Album has no accounts, no analytics and no telemetry, and there is no server to receive your messages. Everything, including reading an encrypted iPhone backup, happens on your Mac. The single exception is licence activation: if you enter a licence key, the key and a device identifier are sent to our licence server to check it. That request carries no messages, attachments or contacts, and an unlicensed copy never contacts the licence server at all.

Yes, if it is in a backup on this Mac. Connect the iPhone or iPad, open Finder, select the device and choose Back Up Now. Message Album then lists that backup as a source alongside the Mac's own library, and exports the conversation from it. Encrypted and unencrypted backups both work; Messages are included either way.

Indirectly, and that is usually what people want. The main output is an offline website, so you open index.html in Safari or Chrome and use Print › Save as PDF to get a PDF of the whole thread, including images, at whatever page size you need. Message Album does not write PDF directly, because a PDF cannot hold playable video or original-quality attachments the way the archive folder does.

Yes. Group threads export with every participant's messages and attachments. Replacing a phone number with a contact's name and photo is done for one-to-one conversations only; in group threads, participants appear by the address stored in the conversation.

Yes. An export is an ordinary folder of HTML, JSON, Markdown and media files. Copy it anywhere and open index.html in any modern browser. The reader deliberately uses no framework, CDN, external font or web server, so it does not need an internet connection or any particular operating system.

No. The Messages database is opened through SQLite's read-only and query-only modes, which prevent writes at the database-driver level rather than relying on the app to behave. Attachments are copied, never moved. Your Messages app is left exactly as it was.

You get a second, separately timestamped archive. Exports are immutable snapshots and never overwrite each other. To keep repeat exports cheap, attachments that are byte-identical to ones in an earlier archive in the same destination are cloned instead of copied, so on APFS a second export of a large conversation adds almost no disk. Each archive still verifies and opens on its own, and deleting one never affects another.

It is recorded as an explicit warning in manifest.json rather than silently skipped, so you can tell the difference between a conversation that had no photo and one whose photo is missing locally. The same applies to Apple-private message payloads that cannot be decoded. Message Album can only copy files that are on the disk; it has no way to reach into iCloud for one that is not, because it never contacts Apple's servers. Usually the fix is simple: open the conversation in Messages, scroll to the message and let the attachment download, then export again. If the message was deleted on another device, see the next answer.

Sometimes, and it is worth acting quickly. With Messages in iCloud turned on, deleting a message on one device removes it and its attachments from iCloud, so there is no longer a copy on Apple's servers to download. If your Mac still shows those messages, what it holds is a local database row; an attachment it never downloaded is not stored there. Apple keeps deleted messages in Recently Deleted for 30 days, removes them from your devices after 30 days, and permanently deletes them from iCloud after 40. Within that window you can choose View then Recently Deleted in Messages on the Mac, or Recently Deleted in the conversation list on iPhone, and recover the conversation; with Messages in iCloud on, recovering on one device recovers on all of them, and the attachments become downloadable again. Past that window those attachments are gone, and no export tool can bring them back. An iPhone or iPad backup made before the deletion is the other place they may still exist, and Message Album can read one directly.

No, and it can make things worse. Syncing pulls from iCloud, so if the messages were already deleted elsewhere there is nothing on the server to retrieve. If Messages in iCloud is still enabled on the Mac and has simply not caught up, forcing it can propagate the deletion to the Mac and remove the only remaining copy. If a conversation exists on your Mac and nowhere else, export it first and investigate afterwards. An export only reads and copies; it never changes the Messages database.

Every archive includes manifest.json with source and output counts, sizes, recoverable warnings and SHA-256 checksums for the files it contains, so you can verify later that an archive is byte-for-byte what was exported. Whether a given record is admissible anywhere is a question for the people who will accept it, not something any software can promise.

Apple's Messages database is private implementation detail and can change between macOS releases, so Message Album may need updates to keep reading it. The exported format is deliberately independent of Apple's schema and is versioned separately, which means archives you have already made stay readable regardless of what Apple does next.