Chat Archive Viewer is a Chrome extension that opens the data export from ChatGPT or Claude and gives you every chat back: listed by month, searchable, and kept on your own device.
You know you had that conversation. A cover letter, a fix for a bug you just hit again, a plan you talked through months ago. Finding it is the hard part. You scroll the sidebar, guess at search words, and give up.
Both ChatGPT and Claude let you download all of your chats as a data export. The catch is what arrives. Your history comes in a ZIP, and the chats sit, usually in a single file, called conversations.json. If you have used the app for a long time, that file can run to several hundred megabytes, sometimes over 1 GB. It is built for machines, not for reading. Open it in a text editor and you get a wall of JSON, if the editor opens it at all.
We built Chat Archive Viewer to turn that file back into something you can read.
Step 1: Request your export
- ChatGPT: Settings > Data controls > Export data. OpenAI emails you a download link.
- Claude: Settings > Privacy > Export data. Anthropic emails you a download link.
Download the file when the email arrives. You do not need to unzip it. The extension opens the ZIP directly, and a loose conversations.json works too.
Step 2: Open it in Chat Archive Viewer
Click the extension's toolbar button, open your export file, and your archive is built right in the browser. Here is what you get:
- Every chat by month. Newest first, with a jump-to-month menu. No more scrolling a sidebar or guessing search words.
- Full-text search. Search the text of every message, not just titles.
- Save any chat. Download it as Markdown or print it to PDF. The print layout includes the whole conversation, start to finish.
- Huge exports are fine. The file is read in small pieces in the background, so an 850 MB export does not freeze or crash the tab.
- The version you kept. Edited prompts and regenerated replies are handled, so you see the version you kept, like in the app.
- Nothing dropped. Code blocks keep their language and have a copy button. Tool calls, file attachments and image prompts are shown.
Private by design
Your chat history can hold a lot: work, health questions, money, people. So the extension is built to see nothing except the one file you give it.
- It has no access to any website and asks for no site permissions.
- It never reads chatgpt.com or claude.ai and never logs in anywhere. It only reads the export file you choose.
- Your archive is stored in this browser only. "Clear archive" removes it, and uninstalling removes it too.
- Nothing is uploaded. The only thing it ever checks online is your Pro payment status.
Our end-to-end tests load the extension in Chromium and check its permissions, and that free users make no network calls at all.
Free and Pro
- Free: open, search and save your newest 100 chats. No account needed.
- Pro, $12 one-time: every chat, search across everything, export your whole archive as Markdown files, and export an Obsidian vault with front matter and a month index.
There is no subscription. Payments are handled by ExtensionPay and Stripe.
What it does not do yet
Version 1 shows a placeholder for each image, with its size and prompt, but it does not load the image files from the ZIP. It is built and tested for Chrome.
Rather run a script?
If you would rather not install an extension, our free guides do parts of this for ChatGPT exports with short Python scripts:
- ChatGPT export: convert conversations.json to Markdown
- How to browse all your old ChatGPT chats by month
- How to open a huge ChatGPT export without crashing
Get it
Get Chat Archive Viewer from the Chrome Web Store. It is free for your newest 100 chats. More on the Chat Archive Viewer page.
Chat Archive Viewer is an independent tool by 1088 Labs. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by OpenAI or Anthropic. ChatGPT is a trademark of OpenAI. Claude is a trademark of Anthropic. They are named here only to say which export files the tool opens.