Unemployed TechBro on a Sunday Morning

7 min read6 days ago

How I Saved My Snapchat Memories: A Fun Tech Adventure

I’m a nostalgic person who loves holding on to memories. Recently, I realized I might lose access to my Snapchat memories, so I decided to download them and keep them safe. What started as a simple task turned into a mini-adventure filled with tech tricks, colorful scripts, and a lot of patience. Here’s my story!

The Problem: No Space on My Mac

My Mac was running out of storage, but I wanted to save my Snapchat memories locally. I went to accounts.snapchat.com to request my data. Easy, right? Nope.

For weeks, I kept getting a “security restriction” error. It felt like Snapchat had made the process harder on purpose — probably because handling 30GB of data (yes, that’s how much I had!) isn’t easy for them either.

Talking to Customer Support

Since I couldn’t fix the issue myself, I contacted Snapchat support. It took over a week of emails and waiting for 72 hours repeatedly before they finally fixed the issue. The best part? A support agent named Maple stepped in and saved the day!

Maple made some adjustments on their end, and soon after, I got the email saying my data was ready for download. Finally!

KUDOS TO SNAPCHAT SUPPORT ❤

The Download Struggle

I downloaded 15 zip files containing all my Snapchat memories onto my Mac, but there was one problem — I didn’t have enough storage to extract even one of them. Deleting files wasn’t an option because I didn’t want to risk losing anything important.

Luckily, I had a solution: my phone’s SD card had 128GB of free space! I decided to copy the zip files from my Mac to my phone and extract them there.

Using ADB and a Flashy Script

To transfer the files, I used ADB (Android Debug Bridge). Once the files were on my phone, I wrote a simple script to extract all the zip files automatically. Of course, I added some colorful messages because who doesn’t love flashy scripts?

Here’s the script:

RED='\033[0;31m'
GREEN='\033[0;32m'
YELLOW='\033[0;33m'
CYAN='\033[0;36m'
NC='\033[0m'
echo -e "${CYAN}TAZER: Starting extraction of all ZIP files...${NC}"
for file in mydata~*.zip; do
    folder_name="${file%.*}"  
    echo -e "${YELLOW}TAZER: Checking $folder_name...${NC}"
if [ -d "$folder_name" ]; then
        echo -e "${RED}TAZER: Folder $folder_name already exists. Skipping extraction to prevent overwriting.${NC}"
        continue
    fi
mkdir -p "$folder_name"
start_time=$(date +%s)
echo -e "${GREEN}TAZER: Extracting $file into $folder_name...${NC}"
    unzip -q "$file" -d "$folder_name"
end_time=$(date +%s)
    duration=$((end_time - start_time))
    echo -e "${CYAN}TAZER: Finished extracting $file in ${duration}s!${NC}"
done
echo -e "${GREEN}TAZER: All files extracted successfully!${NC}"

Running it was fun — until Linux permissions got in the way (ugh). Instead of running ./script.sh, I had to use sh script.sh to make it work. Classic Linux!

Battery Issues and Wireless ADB

Just when things were going well, my phone’s battery died in the middle of managing 30GB of files. After plugging it into the charger, I decided to set up wireless ADB so I wouldn’t need to keep connecting my phone with a cable. Here’s how it worked:

adb tcpip 5555  
adb connect 192.168.1.38:5555

Now everything happened directly on my phone — no laptop needed! This setup saved me from installing extra apps like Termux because I prefer keeping things simple and minimal.

took around 1 hour and 4 minutes to extract on phone.

Surprise, surprise, surprise! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

What’s Next? Uploading It All Back to the Cloud!

Surprise, surprise, surprise! After all that effort to download and extract my Snapchat data, guess what I did next? I uploaded the entire 30GB back to the cloud — this time to Google Photos.

Now, you might ask, “Why go through all this trouble just to upload it back?” Well, my answer might sound silly, but it’s a habit. I’ve always stored everything on Google Photos. Sure, Snapchat is free and Google Photos is paid, but hear me out.

Why Google Photos?

I have another device running a custom ROM called PixelExperience. If you know, you know! Basically, this setup allows me to upload unlimited photos and videos to Google Photos for free. Yes, you read that right — no cost at all.

Here’s why I love Google Photos:

It organizes everything beautifully.
I can search for specific things like “group photo” or “red t-shirt,” and it’ll find exactly what I’m looking for.
It even recognizes faces and objects.
Best of all, I trust Google more than Snapchat when it comes to storing my memories securely.

So, I popped my SD card into my Pixel device, waited a few hours, and voilà — all my Snapchat memories were safely backed up on Google Photos.

Simplifying the Backup Process

One thing that annoys me about backing up to Google Photos is selecting folders one by one. Snapchat’s archive has folders named “Chat Media,” “Memories,” and other random stuff. To make things easier, I prefer consolidating all media files into a single folder before uploading them.

Here’s where another script came in handy. This one-liner🎀 takes all media files from nested folders and moves them into one folder:

find “Source Directory” -type f \( -iname “*.jpg” -o -iname “*.jpeg” -o -iname “*.png” -o -iname “*.mp4” -o -iname “*.mkv” -o -iname “*.mov” -o -iname “*.gif” -o -iname “*.heic” -o -iname “*.avi” \) -exec mv {} “Destination Directory” \;

Fixing Metadata for Better Search

Here’s another fun fact about Google Photos: it doesn’t use file names for its search feature — it relies on metadata instead. The problem? My Snapchat files had clean metadata but weird file names like:

25-02-05_f9e74b1f-69aa-c542-f79a-3a44b2418c74-overlay.png
2025-02-27_47f93ced-4cea-4f83-b8a0-a454f1d44843-main.jpg
2025-02-28_622977de-aa75-2e5c-2915-97ace63cd745-main.mp4

While the names didn’t bother me much, I wanted to make sure the date and time were embedded in the metadata so Google Photos could index them properly for searches like “photos from February 2025.”

After all that effort, I hit one last roadblock: Google Photos ignored my files’ metadata because Snapchat’s archives had stripped the dates. I tried exiftool and touch -t on my Mac, but… well, Apple things happened.

The Android Solution

I switched to my trusty Android phone (bye, Mac struggles!) and installed Termux1, a Linux terminal app. After running pkg install exiftool to get the metadata tool5, I wrote this script to automate fixing timestamps:

#!/system/bin/sh
target_dir="<PATH IN SD CARD on MOBILE>"
if ! command -v exiftool &> /dev/null
then
    echo "Error: Install exiftool with 'pkg install exiftool'."
    exit 1
fi
echo "Starting metadata update in: $target_dir"
cd "$target_dir"
processed_count=0
start_time=$(date +%s)
for file in *; do
    if [[ -f "$file" ]]; then
        filename=$(basename "$file")
        extension="${filename##*.}"
        if [[ "$extension" =~ ^(jpg|jpeg|JPG|JPEG)$ ]]; then
            date_part=$(echo "$filename" | cut -d'_' -f1)
            if [[ "$date_part" =~ ^[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}$ ]]; then
                formatted_date="${date_part//-/}: 00:00:00"
                exiftool "-DateTimeOriginal=$formatted_date" -overwrite_original "$file"
                echo "Updated: $filename → $formatted_date"
                processed_count=$((processed_count + 1))
            else
                echo "Skipped: $filename (invalid date)"
            fi
        else
            echo "Skipped: $filename (not JPG)"
        fi
    fi
done
# Stats
end_time=$(date +%s)
echo "Done! Processed $processed_count files in $((end_time - start_time)) seconds."

The Long Wait

I ran the script overnight on my phone. Processing 30GB of files on an SD card took 7 hours — painfully slow, but hey, unemployed tech geeks have time!

Bonus cleanup steps:

Deleted all .png and overlay files (useless stickers).
Left .mp4 files untouched (metadata was already fine).

Wrapping Up

After all this effort — downloading data from Snapchat, extracting archives, organizing files, and trying to fix metadata — I finally have my memories safely stored in a place where they’re easy to access and search. Was it a lot of work? Absolutely. Was it worth it? For a nostalgic tech geek like me? 100%.

If you’ve read this far, drop a comment! It’ll make my day knowing someone else wasted their time reading this chaotic brain dump of mine. 😄

funny image for thumbnail bwahahahaha