With this script, you can extract all photos, videos, and gifs from your Messenger conversations and save them to your local drive. It also edit their creation date metadata to ensure that they are correctly sorted and displayed in your photo library. This feature is particularly useful if you have transferred your Messenger media to a new device or a photo cloud or even if you have lost the original creation date information.
The script is easy to use and comes with detailed documentation to help you get started. You can customize the script to extract only specific types of media files or to edit only the creation dates of files that meet certain criteria. The script also includes error handling to ensure that your files are not accidentally deleted or overwritten.
I welcome your feedback and suggestions for future updates to the script.
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To get started, you'll need to request a copy of your personal data from Facebook. Go to the Facebook Privacy Center and follow the instructions to download a copy of your data in the JSON format.
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Once you have downloaded the data, extract all the zip files into a single folder.
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Next, you'll need to download the Python script. You can either clone the project from Github or download the latest version ZIP file of the release. For this tutorial, we'll be using the exe file.
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Once you have downloaded the script, copy the "messages" folder from your extracted Facebook data and place it at the same level as the main executable file.
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Now you're ready to run the script. Double-click on the executable and wait for the script to complete. This may take some time depending on the amount of data you have.
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Once the script has finished running, you should see a "done" folder that contains all the processed conversations, an "output" folder that contains all the media files with their creation date metadata edited, and an "error" folder in case the script encountered any issues with a conversation.
