Help & Guide
Everything you need to get the most out of Export Reader.
Contents
🚀 Getting Started
Export Reader lets you read, search, and analyse your ChatGPT and Claude conversation exports. Here's how to get up and running:
In ChatGPT: go to Settings → Data Controls → Export data. You'll receive an email with a download link for a ZIP file. For Claude: go to Settings → Account → Export Data.
Go to Tools and upload your ZIP file. We'll auto-detect whether it's a ChatGPT or Claude export and begin indexing.
Your conversations are extracted, parsed, and stored. This usually takes a few seconds to a couple of minutes depending on how many conversations you have.
📊 Dashboard
Your Dashboard is your home screen once logged in. It shows:
- Total conversations — how many chats are in your archive
- Archive start & last activity — the date range of your conversation history
- Average mood — overall emotional tone across your recent conversations (if mood analysis has been run)
- My Wrapped — a quick link to your personalised AI stats card (see My Wrapped below)
- From Your Archive — three rotating cards surfacing forgotten conversations (see From Your Archive below)
- Popular topics — a tag cloud of your most common topics, sized by frequency
- Activity graph — a 3D bar chart of your conversation activity over the last 30 days
🗂️ From Your Archive
Each day your Dashboard surfaces up to three forgotten conversations from your history, so old chats don't just sink to the bottom of the pile. Three card types rotate automatically:
- On This Day — a chat you had on this exact date 1, 2 or 3 years ago
- Unfinished Business — an old chat where the AI asked a follow-up question that you never replied to. The unanswered question is shown right on the card.
- The Callback — an older conversation thematically linked (by tag) to one you've had this week
Refresh & Dismiss
- Refresh — click the Refresh button (top-right of the section) to swap the current cards for new picks. Limited to 3 refreshes per day per account; the counter shows how many you have left.
- Dismiss — hide a single card for 30 days using the Dismiss button. Useful for snoozing an Unfinished Business question you don't actually want to revisit.
- Open — jumps straight into the conversation, like clicking any other chat link.
✨ My Wrapped
My Wrapped generates a shareable, personalised stats card from your entire conversation history — a bit like Spotify Wrapped, but for your AI chats.
It includes:
- Personality badge — one of nine archetypes (e.g. The Researcher, The Power User, The Wordsmith) chosen from your usage patterns
- Headline stats — total chats, total words, average words per chat, longest chat
- Peak times — the day of the week and hour when you're most active
- Longest streak — your longest run of consecutive days with at least one chat
- Top topics — your five most-used tags
- Average mood — overall emotional tone across your archive
The card is rendered as a 1080×1080 image you can download and share. The link to My Wrapped appears next to the welcome message at the top of your Dashboard once you have at least 10 conversations indexed.
💬 Browsing Chats
The Chats page is where you search and browse your entire conversation archive.
Searching & filtering
Use the search bar to find conversations by keyword. Matching text is highlighted in the results. You can also filter by tag, space, or use the toolbar buttons:
- ⭐ Favourites — show only your starred/bookmarked conversations
- ⚠️ Needs Review — show low-confidence AI categorisations
- 👁️ Show Hidden — reveal conversations you've hidden
Favouriting chats
Click the ☆ star button on any chat card to mark it as a favourite. The star turns ⭐ gold when active. You can also favourite a chat from within the chat view using the ☆ Favourite button in the header. Use the ⭐ Favourites filter in the toolbar to quickly find your starred conversations.
Reading a conversation
Click any conversation to open it. Messages are displayed in a chat bubble format with clear user/assistant labels. Code blocks are syntax-highlighted and include a Copy button.
Saving content
Inside any conversation you can save content as Snippets in two ways:
- Click a bubble — click any message bubble to select it, then click Save bubble to Snippets in the toolbar that appears
- Select text — highlight any text within a message, then use the Save selection to Snippets toolbar
✂️ Snippets
Snippets let you save useful text, code, or images from your conversations for quick reference.
Creating a snippet
Open any conversation from Chats, then:
- Click a message bubble — the bubble is highlighted and a floating toolbar appears. Click Save bubble to Snippets to save the entire message.
- Select text — highlight any text within a message. A floating toolbar appears with Save selection to Snippets.
- Save an image — click the 💾 Save image to Snippets button below any image in a conversation.
Snippets are saved instantly — no dialog required. The title is automatically set from the source conversation.
Managing snippets
Visit the Snippets page to view all your saved items. From there you can:
- Search — filter snippets by keyword, type, or tag
- Edit — update the title, content, type, or tag
- Copy — one-click copy content to your clipboard
- Expand — open a snippet in a focused lightbox view
- Delete — remove snippets you no longer need
Custom tags
You can create your own tags to organise snippets. On the Snippets page, click the + Tag button next to the search bar to create a new tag. Custom tags appear as filter pills with snippet counts and can be deleted with the × button.
🖼️ Media
The Media page shows all images, audio, and video files from your conversations.
- Images — PNG, JPG, JPEG, WEBP formats including DALL-E generations
- Audio — WAV files from voice conversations
- Video — MP4 files
Use the type selector on the page to switch between formats. Click any image to open it in a lightbox viewer with navigation controls.
🔧 Tools
The Tools page contains your core data management utilities. You can jump directly to a specific tool using the Tools ▾ dropdown in the navigation bar.
Upload Export
Upload a ChatGPT or Claude data export ZIP file. Both formats are auto-detected. Large files (up to 5 GB) are supported via chunked upload.
AI Arranger
Automatically organises your chats into logical spaces and generates short summaries. Uses AI to categorise conversations by topic. See the AI Arranger section below for details.
Mood Analysis
Analyses the emotional tone of your entire conversation history and assigns mood scores. See the Mood Analysis section below.
Storage Usage
Shows how much of your storage allocation you're currently using, with a visual progress bar.
Free Up Space
Cleans up leftover temporary files from interrupted or partial uploads. Safe to run any time — it only removes orphaned chunks, never your indexed conversations or media. Useful if a large upload was cancelled and you want to reclaim the disk space immediately.
🎭 Mood Analysis
Mood analysis examines the emotional tone of your conversations and assigns each one a score from very negative to very positive.
- Run it — go to Tools and click Analyze Mood
- View results — your Dashboard shows your average mood with a visual indicator, and each conversation gets its own mood label
- Mood labels — Very Negative, Negative, Neutral, Positive, or Very Positive
Mood scores are computed using text analysis of message content. Results become more accurate with larger conversation histories.
🤖 AI Arranger
The AI Arranger uses artificial intelligence to automatically organise your conversations:
- Space assignment — groups related conversations into topic spaces (e.g. "coding", "writing", "research")
- Summaries — generates a brief summary for each conversation
- Confidence scores — each arrangement includes a confidence level so you can review uncertain categorisations
To run it, go to Tools and click Arrange All. Progress is shown in real time.
🌓 Theme (Light / Dark)
Export Reader supports both dark and light themes. Click the 🌓 button in the navigation bar to toggle between them.
- Dark mode — the default theme, easy on the eyes in low light
- Light mode — a clean white/gray theme for daytime or well-lit environments
Your theme preference is saved in your browser and persists across sessions. The toggle is available on every page.
⚙️ Settings & Account
Manage your account from the Settings page:
- Profile — view your email, current plan tier, and max upload size
- Change password — update your password (Google sign-in users can also set a backup password)
- Clear data — remove all your uploaded files and indexed conversations while keeping your account
- Delete account — permanently remove your account and all associated data (requires email confirmation)
🔒 Privacy & Security
Your data privacy is important to us. Here's how we handle your information:
- Your data is yours — we don't read, share, or use your conversations for any purpose other than providing the service to you
- Per-user isolation — your uploads and conversations are stored in a private namespace that only your account can access
- No training — your data is never used to train AI models
- Delete anytime — you can permanently delete all your data or your entire account from Settings
- Security headers — we use Content Security Policy, HSTS, and other security headers to protect your session
- Rate limiting — login attempts and API calls are rate-limited to prevent abuse
For full details, see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
What export formats are supported?
We support ChatGPT exports (the ZIP file you get from OpenAI's "Export data" feature) and Claude exports (from Anthropic's data export). Both are auto-detected when you upload.
Is there a file size limit?
You can upload ZIP files up to 5 GB depending on your plan. Most exports are well under 100 MB.
What happens if I upload a newer export?
We'll detect duplicate conversations based on content hashing and skip them. Only new or changed conversations are added to your archive.
Can I use Export Reader on mobile?
Yes. The interface is fully responsive and works on phones and tablets. However, uploading very large export files is best done from a desktop browser.
Do I need to keep my export file after uploading?
We recommend keeping your original export ZIP as a personal backup. Once uploaded and indexed, your conversations are stored on our servers and accessible through Export Reader.
How do I export from ChatGPT?
In ChatGPT, go to Settings → Data Controls → Export data. OpenAI will email you a download link within a few minutes. Download the ZIP file and upload it here.
How do I export from Claude?
In Claude, go to Settings → Account → Export Data. Anthropic will prepare your export as a downloadable ZIP file.
Where can I see what's new?
The Updates page lists every feature, fix and improvement as it ships, organised by month. You can filter by tag (NEW, IMPROVED, FIXED, SECURITY, PERFORMANCE) or subscribe via RSS.
Something isn't working — how do I report a bug?
Use the bug report page (the 🐞 icon in the navigation bar) to let us know. Include as much detail as you can about what happened.