Importing from WhatsApp

This page walks you through bringing someone's WhatsApp messages, photos, videos and voice notes into a memorial on Northstar. It is meant to be followed step by step while you do it.

Four things to know before you start:

• Only the person you choose is kept. A chat holds everyone's messages; we read the others only to find theirs, and never store them.
• Nothing is added to the memorial automatically. You see everything first and choose what to keep.
• What you import is yours alone until you add it. Nobody else helping run the memorial can see it.
• WhatsApp import is part of Keep, from £5 a month, on the memorial you are importing into. Anything already added stays if a plan ends.

Step 1: export the chat from WhatsApp

Do this on the phone that has the chat. It can be a chat with the person on their own, or a group they were in.

On iPhone

1. Open the chat in WhatsApp.
2. Tap the contact or group name at the top.
3. Scroll down and tap Export chat.
4. Choose Attach media, so the photos, videos and voice notes come too.
5. Save the file to Files. It will be a single zip file.

On Android

1. Open the chat in WhatsApp.
2. Tap the contact or group name at the top.
3. Scroll down and tap Export chat.
4. Choose Include media.
5. Save the zip file somewhere you can find it, such as your files or your email to yourself.

If your phone gives you separate files rather than one zip file, this import cannot read them yet.

Step 2: upload the zip to Northstar

1. Open the memorial you are importing into and go to the page where you review contributions.
2. Find the Import from WhatsApp card and select Import a WhatsApp chat.
3. Choose the zip file and leave it zipped. It can be up to 1 GB.

Step 3: choose whose messages to keep

Once the file is read, you see the people in the chat, with how many messages and files each sent and when. Choose the person who died. Someone saved in the phone as a number, not a name, is shown by the last four digits of that number.

Their text messages are grouped by day, so each day becomes one item, with the time of each message. Each photo, video and voice note becomes an item of its own. Each is dated the day it was sent.

Step 4: choose what to add, and who can see it

On the review screen, choose the items you want and who can see them. Everything from WhatsApp starts as Just me, so only you can see it. You can change that to the family, or to everyone who can see the memorial, for all of them or one at a time. Then select Add.

If you added something by mistake, Remove takes it off again and puts it back in the list. Anything you have not added is deleted 30 days after you last added or removed something.

Common questions

Will anyone else in the chat see their messages on the memorial?

Only if you add them and choose who can see them. Other people's messages are never kept at all.

A voice note will not play.

WhatsApp voice notes are kept exactly as they were sent, and some browsers, older iPhones in particular, cannot play that kind of file. When that happens you see a link to download it instead, and it plays in most music or video apps.

Some photos or videos did not come through.

If the chat was exported without media, only the messages come through: export it again and choose Attach media or Include media. Videos over 50 MB, and photos and voice notes over 20 MB, are left out. Stickers, contact cards and documents are left out too. A chat with more than 2,000 items keeps the most recent 2,000, and the review screen tells you what was left out.

It said the file does not look like a WhatsApp chat export.

The zip needs the chat's text file inside it, as WhatsApp makes it. Export the chat again and upload that zip without changing it.

Still stuck

If something here did not work, get in touch and tell us what happened at which step, whether the chat came from an iPhone or an Android phone, and roughly how large the file is.

Last reviewed: 4 November 2026