If a video told you Snapchat is about to get rid of your Memories, take a breath: Snap says it isn’t deleting them. Something real does change in January 2027, though, and the details decide whether it affects you at all. Here’s what Snap has actually said, which memories it touches and what you can do about it, with sources.
The short answer
Snapchat isn’t deleting your Memories. Snap’s Help Center says Snapchat “will not automatically delete your Memories because you do not upgrade.” What it describes instead is an archive, starting in January 2027:
“Memories that are more than one year old and are not part of your oldest 5GB of Memories will be archived and remain stored on Snapchat.”
“No Memories will be archived before January 2027.”
Snap Help Center, How do I manage my Memories storage?
In plain English: from January 2027, some of your older memories turn into thumbnails. They stay on Snapchat, but you’ll need a paid storage plan to open, edit or share them. Your oldest 5 GB and anything from the past year aren’t affected. And anything you’ve downloaded is yours to keep, plan or no plan.
Which memories get archived
A memory is archived only if both of these are true:
- It’s more than one year old.
- It’s not part of your oldest 5 GB of Memories.
That splits your Memories into three groups:
- Your oldest memories, up to 5 GB: not archived.
- Everything from the past 12 months: not archived (yet).
- Everything in between: archived from January 2027, so you’d need a storage plan to open it.
Here’s a made-up example. Say you’ve been saving since 2016, and your earliest memories add up to 5 GB by mid-2018. In January 2027, your memories from 2016 to mid-2018 stay as they are, and so does everything from the previous 12 months. The stretch from mid-2018 to around January 2026 is what gets archived.
If your Memories add up to 5 GB or less in total, none of them are archived, because all of them count as your oldest 5 GB.
What “archived” looks like
According to Snap’s Help Center, archived memories remain stored on Snapchat and appear as thumbnails. To open, edit or share one, you need a storage plan. Snap lists two ways forward: subscribing or downloading.
What Snap hasn’t shown yet is exactly how this will look in the app, or how downloading works for a memory once it’s archived. Snap has promised an in-app notice before archiving starts; we’ll add its wording here.
It rolls forward every month
The one-year line isn’t a single event in January. It moves with the calendar. In February 2027, memories from February 2026 cross it. In March 2027, memories from March 2026 do, and so on.
Two things follow from that:
- If you download everything before January and keep saving memories, the new ones will cross the line in their turn.
- If you use Memories as your camera roll, plan to export again every few months, not just once.
Timeline
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| July 2016 | Snapchat launches Memories. |
| 26 September 2025 | Snap announces Memories Storage Plans: 5 GB free; paid plans with 100 GB, 250 GB with Snapchat+ or 5 TB with Platinum; and 12 months of temporary storage for memories above 5 GB. TechCrunch reports the prices. |
| Fall 2025 onward | The plans roll out gradually, account by account. Banners appear at different times, so each account’s 12 months start on a different date. |
| By September 2026 | Snap’s Help Center spells out the January 2027 archive rule and says memories won’t be automatically deleted. |
| 21 September 2026 | The effective date of Snap’s Terms of Service. Widely misread as a deletion deadline. It isn’t one. |
| Late September to October 2026 | The first accounts reach the end of their 12 months of temporary storage. Others follow at different times. |
| January 2027 (exact day not published) | Archiving begins, with an in-app notice first. Nothing is archived before this. |
| Every month after | Another month of memories passes the one-year mark. |
If your 12 months of temporary storage have already run out, nothing has happened to your memories: archiving doesn’t start before January 2027.
How to check how much storage you use
Snapchat shows how much Memories storage you’re using inside the app. We’re deliberately not giving you a tap-by-tap path, because the menu labels differ between app versions and regions. Snap’s Help Center article How do I manage my Memories storage? has the current steps.
Once you find the number, here’s how to read it:
- 5 GB or less: nothing gets archived under the current rule. A copy outside Snapchat is still a good idea, but there’s no rush.
- More than 5 GB: the amount above 5 GB, minus whatever you saved in the past year, is roughly what gets archived in January. That amount grows each month as the one-year line moves.
How many photos is 5 GB?
The honest answer: it depends mostly on how many videos you saved. Videos take up far more space than photos, so two people with the same number of memories can use very different amounts of storage.
We don’t have measured average file sizes for Snapchat photos and videos, so we won’t pretend to give you a count. Here’s the method instead:
- Check your storage number in the app (see above). It’s the only figure that really matters.
- Think about your mix. Mostly photos? 5 GB goes a long way. Lots of videos, especially long ones? It fills up much faster.
- Do the arithmetic with your own guesses if you want a rough feel.
A worked example, using round numbers purely to show the arithmetic, not measurements: if a photo were 2 MB and a video 20 MB, 5 GB (about 5,000 MB) would hold about 2,500 photos, or about 250 videos, or a mix such as 1,000 photos (2,000 MB) plus 150 videos (3,000 MB). Change the guesses and the answer changes a lot, which is exactly why the number in your app beats any rule of thumb.
Your options
There are three reasonable paths. None of them is wrong; they just trade money, effort and control differently.
Option 1: Pay Snap to keep them in Snapchat
Snap’s plans, in US pricing:
- Memories Storage, 100 GB: $1.99/month or $20/year
- Snapchat+, 250 GB: $3.99/month
- Snapchat Platinum, 5 TB: $15.99/month
Outside the US, check the price in your Snapchat app. Snap hasn’t published local prices.
This is the zero-effort choice, and if you’re happy keeping Snapchat as your photo archive, it’s a perfectly sensible one. The trade-off: it’s a subscription, so access lasts as long as you keep paying, and your memories stay inside Snapchat rather than in a photo library you control.
Option 2: Download everything with Snap’s export (free)
Snap lets you download your data, Memories included, at no cost:
- Request it. In the app, go to Settings → Privacy Controls → My Data, or sign in at accounts.snapchat.com. Our guide walks through both routes: in the app and on the web.
- Include your Memories, plus the JSON data files, which hold the real dates and locations.
- Wait for the email. Snap says it “strive[s] to deliver data within 7 days” (Snap Help Center). In practice it’s usually hours to a few days.
- Download every ZIP part, promptly. Big accounts get several ZIP files, and the download window has recently been only about 3 to 4 days. See downloading the ZIPs.
Two things to know before you start:
- My Eyes Only isn’t included unless you move those memories back into Memories before you request the export.
- Saving from inside the app to your camera roll is fine for a few favorites, but it only does 100 at a time, and the copies come out with the wrong dates and cropped edges.
What you get is complete but raw. Older memories don’t carry their original date inside the file, so photo apps tend to file them under the day you downloaded them (here’s why). Captions and stickers arrive as separate overlay files, and some videos come split into 10-second pieces.
Because the export can take days and the links expire quickly, it’s easier to request it well before January than in the same week as everyone else. Stuck? See our troubleshooting section.
Option 3: Download, then organize with a tool
If you want your memories to land in your photo library on the right day, with captions and full-length videos, you need something to process the export. If you’re comfortable with Python, free scripts can do a lot of this.
We make one of these tools, so weigh this paragraph accordingly. Memohop is an independent app for Mac and Windows, not affiliated with Snap Inc. It runs 100% on your computer and reads the ZIPs as they are, with no unzipping. It writes the real dates, times and GPS back into each photo’s EXIF and each video’s metadata, puts captions and stickers back (you can switch that off per memory) and rejoins videos split into 10-second pieces. Then it publishes to Apple Photos / iCloud Photos, or exports to a folder, a ZIP or Google Drive. Google Photos publishing is rolling out.
Because the one-year line keeps moving, it also marks what you’ve already moved, with badges and a “Not yet migrated” filter, so running it again on a newer export doesn’t create duplicates. You can preview your whole timeline and process up to 100 memories free. After that, it’s a one-time Lifetime license.
Myths (and where they came from)
“Snapchat is deleting memories in September”
Two things landed close together. Snap’s Terms of Service took effect on 21 September 2026, and lots of posts and videos read that date as a deletion deadline. Around the same time, the first 12-month temporary storage windows started ending. Neither one removes anything. Snap’s Help Center says memories won’t be automatically deleted because you don’t upgrade, and that nothing is archived before January 2027.
“Everything over 5 GB goes”
The September 2025 announcement led with the 5 GB free limit and temporary storage for anything above it, and plenty of people filled in the rest themselves. The actual rule is narrower: memories are archived, not removed; only memories more than a year old are affected; and your oldest 5 GB is protected.
“There’s a countdown to the exact day”
Snap hasn’t published the exact day in January. The story moved from “deletion in September” to “archive in January,” and some sites never caught up: they still show countdown timers to dates that have already passed or were never announced. The only firm points Snap has given are that nothing is archived before January 2027 and that an in-app notice comes first.
Changelog
- 8 October 2026: first published.
We’ll update this page when Snap’s in-app notice appears, with the exact wording and date, and log every change here.