Yes. Portraitor’s third step is a time period, offering all messages, the last twelve, six or three months, the last month, or a custom range you drag. Its second step narrows the reading to one named participant, with everyone else in the conversation kept as context rather than as a subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two of the four steps are narrowing controls, and both of them sit before the payment step, so you can see exactly what you are asking for before you commit to it. What each control does is stated plainly on the home page. What they promise about the messages you leave out is a separate question, and the published pages are quieter about that one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The home page runs the job in four steps: conversation, who, when, then pay. The third of those asks which time period you want to analyse, and tells you to pick a preset time or drag to select a period of your own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The presets it offers are: process all messages, the last twelve months, the last six months, the last three months, the last month, and a custom range. That is the whole control. There is no setting for a number of messages, no sampling option, and no way to exclude a particular person’s lines from inside the window.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everything upstream of that step is about getting the file in. The uploader accepts .txt, .html, .json or .zip, and the home page will walk you through exporting from WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger or Instagram if you do not already have a file. The WhatsApp export routes are written up separately<\/a>, and which export files can be analysed<\/a> covers the formats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second step asks which person in the conversation you want to analyse. The home page says to pick the one person you want a portrait of, that their messages are read, and that everyone else stays context. It shows the participants it has detected in the chat so you can choose between them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These two controls narrow along different axes, and conflating them is the easy mistake. The time period decides how much of the conversation is in scope at all. The participant decides who the finished portrait is about. Change the first and you change the evidence. Change the second and you change the subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The participant control is not a privacy control. Everyone else staying as context is not the same as everyone else being left out, and the home page does not claim it is. What protects the other people in the conversation is the masking, which runs on your own device and replaces their names, email addresses and telephone numbers before anything is transmitted. That is a different mechanism, described in what group chat analysis does with everyone else<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is where a reader could reasonably assume more than the pages actually say, so it is worth being exact about the gap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The privacy policy says what is transmitted is the masked text, with names, email addresses, telephone numbers, postal addresses and credentials replaced on your own device before anything leaves it. The home page places the time period choice earlier in the flow than the point at which it reports the chat as masked and ready to read. What neither page states is what becomes of the messages outside the window you picked: whether they are dropped before the masking runs, after it runs, or simply never included in the request.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So the honest version of the claim is a narrow one. A shorter window is a smaller request. No published page promises anything specific about the messages you excluded, and this page is not going to invent a promise on Portraitor’s behalf to make the control sound better than it has been described.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What the policy does commit to, for everything that is in scope, it commits to clearly. Conversation content is not stored on the servers, is held only for as long as generation requires, is discarded once the portrait has been produced, and is never written to the database, to backups or to logs. A very large conversation arrives in parts and sits in a temporary file until the request is assembled, at which point it is consumed and deleted. An upload abandoned part way becomes unreadable after fifteen minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Narrowing is a reading decision before it is anything else, and that is the part most people get backwards. A month of a conversation is a month of one mood. Six months of a conversation that changed in month four will show you the change; six weeks of it will show you an opinion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The policy describes the output as inferences about one participant covering personality traits, attachment and conflict style, emotional regulation, motivations and communication style, each carrying an estimate of confidence. A narrow window leaves less to work from, and the confidence figure attached to the result is a claim the system makes about itself rather than an independent check on it, which is the subject of why personality descriptions feel accurate<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So narrow when you have a particular stretch of a conversation in mind and a reason for choosing it: the months after something changed, the period you actually want read. Do not narrow in order to keep part of a conversation away from the analysis, because what that actually does is make the output about less. For the limits that hold at any window length, what a chat analysis cannot tell you about someone<\/a> is the fuller account, and if the conversation is not in English, what the policy says about other languages<\/a> covers that. Both controls sit in front of the payment step, so you can step through them at Portraitor<\/a> and see what you would be asking for before you decide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes. The last month is one of the presets on the home page’s third step, alongside all messages, the last twelve months, the last six months, the last three months and a custom range.<\/p>\n<\/details>\n\n\n\n Yes. The home page offers a custom range and says you can drag to select a time period rather than taking one of the presets.<\/p>\n<\/details>\n\n\n\n The published pages do not say. They state that masking runs on your own device before anything is transmitted, and the home page puts the time period choice earlier in the flow, but neither states what becomes of the messages outside the window you chose.<\/p>\n<\/details>\n\n\n\n Each portrait covers one participant. The home page’s second step asks you to pick the one person you want a portrait of and says everyone else stays as context.<\/p>\n<\/details>\n\n\n\n Before. The home page’s four steps run conversation, who, when, and then pay, so both narrowing controls come before the payment step.<\/p>\n<\/details>\n\n\n\n The controls are simple and they are honest about being simple. Pick the stretch you actually want read, pick the person the portrait is about, and regard the window as a reading choice rather than as a privacy setting, because the pages only ever described it as the first of those.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Portraitor lets you pick a time period and a single participant before you pay. Here is what each control does, and what neither one promises.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":197,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pp_title_highlight":"only part of a chat","pp_meta_title":"","pp_meta_description":"Can you analyse only part of a chat? Yes. Portraitor's time period and participant controls both sit before you pay, and here is what they do not promise.","pp_sidebar_cta":"{\"variant\": \"light\", \"heading\": \"Two controls, both before you pay\", \"bodyHtml\": \"A time period from one month to everything, or a range you drag, and one participant the portrait is about.\", \"label\": \"See how Portraitor works →\"}","pp_sources":"[{\"html\": \"Portraitor, home page<\/em>, the four step flow and the time period presets.\", \"href\": \"https:\/\/portraitor.ai\/\"}, {\"html\": \"Portraitor, Privacy Policy<\/em>, version 1.3, 30 September 2026.\", \"href\": \"https:\/\/portraitor.ai\/privacy\"}]","pp_endcard":"{\"h3\": \"Pick the stretch you actually want read\", \"body\": \"The time period and the participant are both chosen before the payment step, so you can see what you would be asking for first.\", \"label\": \"See how Portraitor works →\"}","pp_howto":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-understanding-yourself"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/portraitor.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/portraitor.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/portraitor.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/portraitor.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/portraitor.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/portraitor.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":198,"href":"https:\/\/portraitor.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions\/198"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/portraitor.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/portraitor.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/portraitor.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/portraitor.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The person you pick narrows it further, and differently<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What a shorter window does not promise<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
When narrowing is the wrong move<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Frequently asked questions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Can I analyse just the last month of a chat?<\/summary>\n
Can I pick my own date range?<\/summary>\n
Does narrowing the window mean the rest of the chat is never sent?<\/summary>\n
Can I get a portrait of two people from the same conversation?<\/summary>\n
Do I choose the time period before or after paying?<\/summary>\n