How to download photos and videos from a Telegram chat + Tips and Tricks

Telegram is becoming popular beyond the technological and anti-Facebook circles -anti-WhatsApp, if you prefer- and it is increasingly normal to see how the application alerts us of the arrival of new contacts. New contacts that join existing ones and the groups and channels that populate a platform that, among many other attributes, stands out for the ability to send all kinds of files, including photos and videos.

Share photos and videos It is one of the basic activities of every modern messaging user and that is what we will do in this article, but it is important to mention that although Telegram distinguishes between different kinds of content to facilitate downloading, it allows you to send files of any type: the only requirement is that its size does not exceed 2 GB limit each (the total storage space in the cloud is, for now, unlimited).

Thus, this “tutorial” focuses on downloading photos and videos because they are the most common content that we share and that we will want to keep later, but it is useful for everything we upload to Telegram. And I put quotation marks around “tutorial” because it is not a complex process, but rather using the tools provided by the application … But not the mobile application, but the desktop application: that is the crux of this particular issue.

How to download photos and videos from a Telegram chat

The fact of the matter is that as with WhatsApp, most people understand Telegram as a mobile application, when it is not. At least not in the case of Telegram. That is why it is not strange that the question arises, own or someone else’s, of «how do I download that pile of photos that have been sent to me?» … Because doing it one by one, when there are many, costs your thing.

This is an aspect in which Telegram still has to improve, since it allows you to send a selection of files grouped which album, but not download them as such. So to “download all the photos that have been sent to you”, you have three ways: one by one; using a service to Google Drive in which to automatically save all the photos and videos that are sent to you … or download them all at once.

The Gogle Drive thing may sound interesting, it is true, but it also has its drawbacks: it is only valid for mobile phones, the unlimited free storage will end shortly and the cleaning of garbage is important: avatars, GIFs, memes … all that is included in the package and it consumes space in the cloud, be it Google’s or any other provider. On the contrary, exporting data from Telegram is a more efficient method.

The Telegram data export it is the way in which you can download all the files that have been sent to you. It was implemented years ago in the application preferences, although the option was later derived to each chat, presumably, due to the huge amount of files that the average user can accumulate. You can download everything they send you in one go, yes, but in a single chat at the same time.

However, you can only do this through the Telegram application for PC, available for Linux, Mac and Windows. The process, yes, is really simple:

1. Download (and obviously install) Telegram Desktop
2. Find the chat (private chat, group or channel, it’s the same) from which you want to download whatever
3. Go to the chat menu and choose the option “Export chat history”

The following steps are quite intuitive: you choose the content you want to download and the size limit (tip: upload it to a maximum of 2 GB with the slider); choose the export format (HTML if it is to see it yourself, JSON if you want to import it into another application), the path where it will be downloaded (make sure you have enough disk space) and, if you want something to be sent to you in a specific period of time , choose the approximate dates.

You give it to export and you give it time to prepare the package, which will take more or less depending on everything you have to download. You will find the result in the indicated directory, perfectly arranged in folders according to the type of file: photos, videos, files … up to stickers, your message history and other kinds of files saved. The export works great and the download is generally very fast.

One last tip, applicable exclusively to downloading photos: Telegram duplicates the images, saving the original and a thumbnail, so it is necessary to do some cleaning once the download is complete. The fastest way to do this is by filtering the term “thumb”, which Telegram adds to the name of each image, and removing all that correspond. Any file manager should help you accomplish this task in a jiffy.