A native Mac app that exports one Messages conversation at a time into a searchable, iMessage-style offline website with the photos, videos and voice notes stored on your Mac. Reads your library without changing it. No account, no cloud, nothing leaves your Mac.
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.
The distinction between a backup and a document you can actually open in ten years is the whole product, and it is the request I hear constantly from people using the Mac apps I work on. What happens to the attachments, do the photos and videos in a thread come across into the album or is it text only?
About Message Album on Product Hunt
“Save one iMessage conversation as a private offline album”
Message Album launched on Product Hunt on August 26th, 2026 and earned 69 upvotes and 5 comments, placing #26 on the daily leaderboard. A native Mac app that exports one Messages conversation at a time into a searchable, iMessage-style offline website with the photos, videos and voice notes stored on your Mac. Reads your library without changing it. No account, no cloud, nothing leaves your Mac.
Message Album was featured in Mac (103.7k followers), Productivity (659.4k followers) and Privacy (11.3k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 174.5k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Message Album?
Message Album was hunted by Aaron Hampton. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Aaron Hampton