Why your Snapchat export has no dates or location

You did everything right. You requested your data from Snapchat, you downloaded the ZIP, and you opened your photos. And every single one says it was taken today, with no location at all. Here is what is going on, and why it is fixable.

Photos carry hidden metadata called EXIF

Every photo your phone takes stores invisible information alongside the image: the date and time it was captured, the GPS coordinates, the camera settings. This is called EXIF metadata. It is what lets Google Photos and Apple Photos sort your library by date and show your shots on a map. The pixels are the picture; the EXIF is the story around it.

Snapchat's export leaves the EXIF out

When Snapchat gives you your Memories, the image and video files themselves come with no EXIF date and no GPS written in. So your photo app falls back to the only date it can see, the day you downloaded the file, and assumes everything happened then. That is why a decade of Memories collapses onto a single day with no map.

The hidden file that has everything: memories_history

Inside your export is a file named memories_history.json (some exports also include an .html version). It is a list of every Memory you ever saved, and for each one it records the original capture date and time and the GPS location. Everything you need is in there. The problem is purely that the data lives in one file and the photos live in another, and nothing has stitched them back together.

Two more things Snapchat splits apart

• Captions and stickers. If you wrote text on a snap or added a sticker, that overlay often arrives as a separate file from the base photo, so your downloaded copy can be missing the caption you remember.
• Time zones. Snapchat records times in UTC. Even tools that do restore the date often paste in the raw UTC time, so an evening snap taken overseas can show up at breakfast.

How to fix it

Fixing this by hand would mean opening that metadata file, finding the matching entry for every single photo, and writing the date and GPS back in one by one. For a few photos that is tedious. For a few thousand it is hundreds of hours.

SnapRescue does it automatically. Point it at your export and it reads memories_history, matches every file to its entry, writes the real capture date and GPS into each photo and video, converts the time to the correct local time using the location, merges captions and stickers back on, and sorts everything into dated folders. It runs on your own computer, so your photos never leave your machine, and it is free for your first 50 files.