Questions about Message Album

macOS protects ~/Library/Messages, and iPhone backups under ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup, from apps that have not been granted Full Disk Access. Without it, no app can read your conversations at all. You grant it once in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Full Disk Access, and you can revoke it whenever you like. The grant lets Message Album read those files; it does not send them anywhere, because the app makes no network requests.

No. Message Album has no accounts, no analytics, no telemetry and no network requests of any kind. There is no server to receive your messages. Everything, including reading an encrypted iPhone backup, happens on your Mac.

Yes, if it is in a backup on this Mac. Connect the iPhone or iPad, open Finder, select the device and choose Back Up Now. Message Album then lists that backup as a source alongside the Mac's own library, and exports the conversation from it. Encrypted and unencrypted backups both work; Messages are included either way.

Indirectly, and that is usually what people want. The main output is an offline website, so you open index.html in Safari or Chrome and use Print › Save as PDF to get a PDF of the whole thread, including images, at whatever page size you need. Message Album does not write PDF directly, because a PDF cannot hold playable video or original-quality attachments the way the archive folder does.

Yes. Group threads export with every participant's messages and attachments. Replacing a phone number with a contact's name and photo is done for one-to-one conversations only; in group threads, participants appear by the address stored in the conversation.

Yes. An export is an ordinary folder of HTML, JSON, Markdown and media files. Copy it anywhere and open index.html in any modern browser. The reader deliberately uses no framework, CDN, external font or web server, so it does not need an internet connection or any particular operating system.

No. The Messages database is opened through SQLite's read-only and query-only modes, which prevent writes at the database-driver level rather than relying on the app to behave. Attachments are copied, never moved. Your Messages app is left exactly as it was.

You get a second, separately timestamped archive. Exports are immutable snapshots and never overwrite each other. To keep repeat exports cheap, attachments that are byte-identical to ones in an earlier archive in the same destination are cloned instead of copied, so on APFS a second export of a large conversation adds almost no disk. Each archive still verifies and opens on its own, and deleting one never affects another.

It is recorded as an explicit warning in manifest.json rather than silently skipped, so you can tell the difference between a conversation that had no photo and one whose photo is missing locally. The same applies to Apple-private message payloads that cannot be decoded.

Every archive includes manifest.json with source and output counts, sizes, recoverable warnings and SHA-256 checksums for the files it contains, so you can verify later that an archive is byte-for-byte what was exported. Whether a given record is admissible anywhere is a question for the people who will accept it, not something any software can promise.

Apple's Messages database is private implementation detail and can change between macOS releases, so Message Album may need updates to keep reading it. The exported format is deliberately independent of Apple's schema and is versioned separately, which means archives you have already made stay readable regardless of what Apple does next.