Apologies if this is off-topic, I am currently in a legal process, and they are asking for repeated patterns and evidence of abuse.
I was hoping I could download about 4.5 years of text history to then search through it without having to screenshot it all or lose my place scrolling.
Is this possible? Im so afraid of losing the texts as they’re my main source of evidence.
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iPhone or Android?
https://www.google.com/search?q=export+text+messages+from+phone
Sorry I have no experience with this but maybe these Google results will help.
I screen shotted all of mine, and used Google photos to save it it. And also on a thumb driveThen I put into the Walgreens app to print pictures.
ETA: I made a new Google account for this, I found it triggering to have it showing up in my daily emails.
You can download them. iPhones use sms.db and you’ll need to get a separate program on your computer to grab them.
For my android, I just hooked it up to my desktop, made sure it was the file I wanted, and downloaded the file. Certain programs on the internet can convert them to pdf
It will depend on your phone but on iOS you can search through your texts from the main window of the messenger app.
Your lawyer can best determine what is needed for your court case, but anecdotally, those screen shots you don’t enjoy taking may be exactly what is needed to enter into evidence.
There are text converter programs where it will take the entire text history. For Android. There might also be a free option
I needed this for a contentious divorce. This was the app i used. It is very useful to pay the full version. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gilapps.smsshare2
If the chat is through whatsapp, then open the chat, then the menu (three dots), select ‘more’ and then ‘export chat’.
You then get an option where to export it to, Id choose your system folders, the default one should be the downloads folder. The texts get saved into one txt file in a zip folder.
I just tried it with my mothers chat
Attorneys that practice family and criminal law use apps or programs to do just this. You might ask someone local to you. (I am a lawyer but don’t practice in those areas. I have friends that do and I’ve seen them discuss the different options in online fora.)
Contact your provider and see if they can pull the data for you and provide it to you in a word type document.
If it’s WhatsApp then you can email the chat to yourself.
For SMSes you’ll have to search online.
There’s definitely a way
If you’re working with a prosecutor or your own attorney, they may have access to phone download programs. The one most police use is called Cellebrite and it downloads texts in a way that they’re not only exportable to PDF, but you can also remove irrelevant texts and show all of the Metadata for the text, so you can prove who it came from and when. That’s going to be the best method for evidence. If you don’t have access to that, look for a program online that can do it. Just because wary of freeware and other software they’re trying to install or the information they retain.
If you have an attorney they will extract them for you as part of discovery. If not for iPhone I know they use iMazing.
You can hand over your phone to the police and they can extract that data for you – there are programs that they use every day that do this. Why do you have to do it for them? This is part of their job, to collect evidence and they can tell you how they can do that.
When I was in Family Court for a custodial dispute and needed to provide text messages as evidence, I was advised by my attorney that only screenshots were admissable. Text documents are too easy to fake.
It’s a real pain in the ass, but stick to using screenshots unless you have different/better guidance from your local law enforcement or judicial system.
There’s an iPhone app called “Tailor” that will stitch screenshots of Text into one long photo. The only problem is it looks really small on the screen because it gets long and skinny, people who are better at photo editing May be able to figure out how to enlarge it so you can print it, I’m not sure if it’s suitable but it probably is.
Or you could print up the screenshots and scan them in order and save it as a PDF which would be searchable as one large document.
Contact the service provider and request a data export.
For iPhone I used PhoneView and then iMazing when PhoneView wasn’t working or available
I just handed over my entire phone to the investigator and let them do it.
Sms? WhatsApp? Telegram?
For sms, you could look into your phone backup or install an sms backup app (try it on a secondary phone first if you can).
For Whatsapp and telegram (and many other online chats) you can download the data. The option is in the settings menu somewhere.
My friend had a court case against her ex and I helped her get all the texts from her iPhone using an app. I don’t super remember what it was but we just hooked her phone up to the computer and it got them all.