How to Move Snapchat Memories to Apple Photos and iCloud (with Dates, Places and Captions)

Your Snapchat Memories belong with the rest of your photos: in Apple Photos, on the day you took them, and on your iPhone through iCloud. Snapchat’s export doesn’t make that easy, but on a Mac it’s very doable. Here’s what a good result looks like, why the obvious approach falls short, and how to get it right step by step.

What “done right” looks like

When your memories are properly in Apple Photos, you get:

• The right day and time. A snap from a summer night in 2017 sits in 2017, not on the day you downloaded your export.
• A pin on the map. Memories with a location show up on the Photos map, photos and videos alike.
• Captions, stickers and drawings exactly as you saved them, or the clean original if you prefer.
• One video per video, not six 10-second clips in a row.
• One album that collects them all, while every memory still sits in your library on its own date.
• Everything on your iPhone and iPad through iCloud Photos, with nothing to do on the phone.

Why dragging the export into Photos doesn’t work

The obvious move is to unzip Snapchat’s export and drag the files into Photos. They import, but the result is a mess:

• Everything lands on today’s date. Older memories carry no capture date inside the file, so Photos falls back to the file or import date. Years of snaps pile up on a single day (here’s why).
• No locations. The real date, time and GPS live in a separate file, json/memories_history.json, which Photos doesn’t read. The times in it are in UTC, not your local time.
• Captions come in as separate images. The media sits in a memories folder with names like 2019-06-01_<id>-main.jpg, and each caption, sticker or drawing is its own transparent -overlay.png next to it.
• Videos arrive in pieces. Longer multi-snap videos come as up to six 10-second clips.
• It’s split across several ZIPs (the 2026 export format), so you have to unzip and merge them all first.

What about saving straight from the Snapchat app? The in-app save to your camera roll works 100 memories at a time, and the copies come out with the wrong dates and cropped edges. There’s no way to save everything to your camera roll at once. It’s fine for a few favorites, not for years of memories.

Before you start: get the complete export

Everything starts with Snapchat’s free data export. Our step-by-step guide covers it in detail; here’s the short version:

1. In Snapchat, go to Settings → Privacy Controls → My Data (in the app), or log in at accounts.snapchat.com.
2. Turn on Export your Memories and Export JSON Files, choose All time and submit. The JSON files hold the dates and locations, so don’t skip them.
3. Move anything in My Eyes Only back to Memories first. It isn’t included otherwise.
4. Wait for Snapchat’s email. It usually takes a few hours to a few days (Snap says it strives to deliver data within 7 days).
5. Download every ZIP as soon as it arrives. The download window is only a few days (about 3–4 recently). Big accounts get several parts of about 2 GB each (mydata~1234567890.zip, then the same name ending in -1, -2 and so on). Get all of them, and don’t mix parts from different requests.

One quick check: a ZIP that’s only a few hundred bytes is an error file, not your memories. Download that part again.

Step by step with Memohop

Memohop is a Mac app (macOS 12 or later, Apple silicon and Intel) built for exactly this job, and there’s a Windows version too. It runs 100% on your computer, so your memories never touch our servers. Download it free and follow along.

1. Drop in the ZIPs

Open Memohop and drag all your Snapchat ZIP files into the window at once. There’s no need to unzip or rename anything. If you have more than one export, say an older request and a newer one, drop those in too: Memohop merges them into one timeline and skips duplicates.

While it reads your export, Memohop:

• Restores dates and places. It writes the original date, time and GPS location into each photo’s EXIF and each video’s QuickTime metadata. It also converts Snapchat’s UTC times to the local time zone of the place, so a late-night snap doesn’t jump to the next morning.
• Puts captions back on. Captions, stickers and drawings are burned back onto the photo or video.
• Rejoins split videos. The 10-second pieces become one video again.

2. Choose what to publish

Your memories appear on a timeline, grouped by year and month. Filters help you narrow things down: Photos, Videos, With location, With captions and Not yet migrated. Select everything, a single year, one trip or just your favorites.

If you’d rather keep a memory clean, switch captions off for that memory and Memohop publishes the original without the overlay.

A good way to start: the free version lets you preview your whole timeline and process and publish up to 100 memories. Use that as a test batch. Pick a few from different years, including a video and something with a caption, publish them, and check the result on your phone before you move everything.

3. Publish to Apple Photos

1. Select the memories you want and choose Apple Photos as the destination.
2. Click Publish.
3. The first time, macOS asks whether Memohop can access your photos. Allow it. If you clicked “Don’t Allow” by mistake, turn Memohop on under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Photos.
4. Your memories land in an album called Snapchat Memories, and they also show up in your main library on their real dates.

Each published memory gets an In Apple Photos badge in Memohop. If you keep more than one Photos library, Memohop publishes into your System Photo Library, which is also the only one iCloud Photos syncs.

4. Watch them arrive on your iPhone via iCloud Photos

Memohop’s job ends at your Mac’s Photos library. From there, if iCloud Photos is on, Apple syncs everything to your iPhone and iPad according to your iCloud settings, album included. If you already use iCloud Photos, there’s nothing else to do.

If you don’t, turn it on in both places (labels can vary by macOS and iOS version):

1. On your Mac: open Photos, go to Photos → Settings → iCloud and check iCloud Photos.
2. On your iPhone or iPad: go to Settings → [your name] → iCloud → Photos and turn on syncing (it’s called “Sync this iPhone” on recent versions and “iCloud Photos” on older ones).

Be patient with big libraries. Uploading many gigabytes can take hours or even days. It happens in the background and can pause when your Mac is in Low Power Mode, on a Low Data Mode connection, or when your iCloud storage is full. Keep the Mac plugged in and awake, and check the sync status at the bottom of the Library view in Photos.

Check the result

Open a few memories on your iPhone or Mac and look at four things:

• Date and time. On iPhone, swipe up on a photo or tap the Info button. On Mac, select it and press Command-I. You should see the day and time you took it.
• Places. The Info panel shows a small map, and the Places or Map view in Photos (the name depends on your version) shows everything as pins, videos included. Memories with no location in Snapchat’s data won’t get a pin.
• Videos. A former multi-snap video should play as one continuous clip.
• Captions. Text, stickers and drawings should sit where you put them.

There’s a bonus over time: Photos builds its Memories and “On This Day”-style features from capture dates, so snaps with their real dates can start turning up there too.

Running it again later without duplicates

One export isn’t the end. Snapchat isn’t deleting your memories, but per Snap’s Help Center, from January 2027 memories older than a year that aren’t part of your oldest 5 GB get archived: thumbnails only, unless you pay or download them. The one-year line keeps moving, so a fresh export every few months is a good habit. We explain the details in what actually happens to your Snapchat Memories in January 2027.

When you run it again:

1. Request a new export from My Data and download every ZIP.
2. Drop the new ZIPs into Memohop.
3. Turn on the Not yet migrated filter. Badges show what’s already in Apple Photos (and in Google Photos, where that’s rolling out), so only the new memories are left.
4. Publish those. Nothing already in your library gets added twice.

Storage: what iCloud needs

Here’s the honest part. Memories in iCloud Photos use iCloud storage, which is Apple’s plan, not ours. A Snapchat library is often several gigabytes, and the free 5 GB iCloud tier is shared with backups and everything else. So most people will need one of Apple’s iCloud+ plans; check current prices under Settings → [your name] → iCloud on your iPhone. Memohop doesn’t sell or include storage.

Your options:

• iCloud+ if you want your memories on every device, synced automatically.
• Optimize Mac Storage (in Photos → Settings → iCloud, instead of “Download Originals to this Mac”) keeps full-resolution originals in iCloud and smaller versions on your Mac when space runs low. It saves space on your Mac, not in iCloud.
• A folder or external drive if you don’t want iCloud at all. Memohop can also export to a folder, a ZIP or Google Drive, with dates, places and captions written into every file.

Whichever you choose, keep your original Snapchat ZIPs until you’ve checked that everything arrived safely.

The manual way, and why it’s slow

You can do all of this without Memohop, if you have the time. Roughly:

1. Unzip and merge every part of the export.
2. Import into Photos. Everything lands on the import date, with no location.
3. Fix the dates. Photos’ Image → Adjust Date and Time works on a selection, but it shifts the whole selection together. It can’t give each photo its own date from the JSON, so you’d be dating memories one by one, converting each UTC time to local time as you go.
4. Fix the places. You can assign a location in the Info window, but only by hand, one place at a time.
5. Put captions back. Each -overlay.png has to be combined with its photo in an image editor, and with its video in a video editor.
6. Rejoin split videos in a video editor, clip by clip, in the right order.

Realistically, the manual route means exiftool plus a script that reads the JSON, converts the times, writes the metadata, burns in the overlays and joins the videos. If you’re comfortable with the command line, that works; just check that your script supports Snapchat’s 2026 export format. For everyone else, it’s slow and easy to get subtly wrong, like times off by a few hours or clips in the wrong order.

That’s the gap Memohop fills. Try it on 100 memories for free, and if you want to move everything, the Lifetime license is a one-time payment, with no subscription. More questions? The FAQ covers the rest.

Memohop is an independent app and isn’t affiliated with Snap Inc.