Chat exports often carry photographs, videos and voice recordings. Portraitor’s privacy policy states that the Service never opens them and never transmits them: only the written messages are read, on your own device, and only their masked text is sent on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The file you get out of a messaging app is rarely just words. Ask WhatsApp for a chat on a phone and it offers to bundle the media in with it, and the result is a zip archive with pictures and voice notes sitting next to the transcript.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That raises an obvious question before you upload anything, and the Portraitor privacy policy answers it in one sentence rather than leaving it to inference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
WhatsApp documents three routes and they do not produce the same thing. On iPhone its help page says to open a chat, tap the contact or group name, then Export chat, and that if the chat contains media you choose With all media, With selected media, or Without media. On Android the same article offers Without media or Include media, and notes that choosing to include it attaches the most recent media. On WhatsApp Web the page is blunter: media is not included at all, unlike exporting on a mobile device.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All three routes produce a zip, and WhatsApp’s own note says the history cannot be re-imported, because it is a text file rather than a backup. The Portraitor uploader accepts .txt, .html, .json or .zip, so the archive goes in whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So the ordinary case is an archive holding one transcript and a pile of attachments. What matters is which half of that archive is read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Section 2 of the privacy policy is explicit. It says chat exports often contain photographs, videos and voice recordings, that the Service never opens them and never transmits them, and that only the written messages are read, on your device, with only their masked text sent on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two separate commitments sit in that sentence and they are worth pulling apart. The first is that the files are not transmitted, so no copy of a photograph reaches a server. The second is stronger and easier to overlook: they are not opened either, so nothing on your device inspects them in passing on the way to deciding what to send.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The reading happens before anything leaves. The policy says your browser removes names, email addresses, telephone numbers, postal addresses and credentials and replaces them with anonymous placeholders, entirely on your own device, and that if that process does not complete successfully no data is transmitted and the payment is refunded automatically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That ordering is the whole architecture. The archive is unpacked where it already sits, the transcript is separated from the attachments, the identifiers in the transcript are swapped out, and the masked text is what travels. A photograph has no step in that sequence at which it could be sent, which is a different kind of assurance from a promise to delete it afterwards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you want the same question answered for the transcript rather than the attachments, the full list of what moves off your device and what stays on it<\/a> is published on the same page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A transcript is small. Text almost always is. The weight in a chat export comes from the attachments, which is the practical argument for choosing the option that leaves them out when the app offers it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Doing so changes nothing about what Portraitor reads, because the media was never going to be opened. It changes how long the file takes to move around your own machine. The export guides for WhatsApp<\/a>, Messenger<\/a> and Instagram<\/a> each step through where that choice appears, and which file types the uploader accepts<\/a> covers what to do with the archive once you have it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the limit that follows from the commitment, and it is a real one. A conversation carried mostly in photographs, voice notes and reaction images is a conversation whose substance is largely invisible to a tool that reads only writing. What comes back is built on the text that happened to be there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is worth knowing before you buy rather than after. If the thread you care about is mostly pictures with short captions, there is not much written material for anything to work from, and no amount of processing invents it.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIf your export is heavy, the media is why<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What a portrait cannot say about a picture you sent<\/h2>\n\n\n\n