Hi Product Hunt, I'm Aaron, the one person behind Message Album. I built it because "back up my iPhone" and "keep this conversation" are different problems. A device backup is an opaque blob you cannot open, search, or hand to someone. A single conversation with a person who matters deserves to be an actual document you can open in ten years. What it does: picks one Messages conversation on your Mac and writes it out as a private, offline, iMessage-style website, with the photos, videos, voice notes and stickers that are stored on that Mac, plus JSON and Markdown transcripts and a checksum manifest. It reads the Messages library read-only and never modifies it. There is no account, no analytics, and no network access at all. It can also read conversations from an iPhone or iPad backup made with Finder on the same Mac. What it does not do, on purpose: it cannot pull anything from iCloud, cannot recover deleted messages, cannot read a plugged-in phone directly, and does one conversation at a time rather than bulk export. Every album says on its face whether it is complete, because a partial backup that looks complete is worse than none. Why not the Mac App Store: reading ~/Library/Messages needs Full Disk Access, which the App Store sandbox does not allow, so it is signed, notarized, and sold direct. The free version exports the last 7 days of any conversation with no key, so you can see the exact output before paying. A live sample album is at messagealbum.com/demo. The full app is a one-time US$29; Product Hunt readers can use PRODUCTHUNT for 30% off this week. Happy to answer anything about the export format or the read-only pipeline.

Message Album

Save one iMessage conversation as a private offline album

Save one iMessage conversation as a private offline album