Backing up your phone and keeping a conversation are different problems. This is a Mac app that only does the second one.

A phone backup is an insurance policy: opaque, all-or-nothing, and useless as a thing to read. Message Album takes the opposite view. You pick one Messages thread, and it writes that thread out as an ordinary folder containing an offline website — both sides of the conversation, laid out the way iMessage lays it out, with instant search and every photo, video and voice note that lives on your Mac, at original quality.

The archive is built to outlive the app, which is the detail that earns the money. Alongside the index.html reader, the folder carries a JSON transcript, a Markdown transcript, an optional CSV, and a manifest with SHA-256 checksums. No database, no proprietary container, nothing that needs Message Album installed to read. Open the HTML in any browser on any machine in twenty years and it works.

It is honest about what it could not get. Attachments that live only in iCloud and were never downloaded to that Mac cannot be fetched — the app never contacts Apple’s servers — so the manifest and the finished-album screen count them and mark the archive incomplete rather than quietly writing a gap. That is the right behaviour and it is rarer than it should be.

It reads the Messages library read-only and cannot modify it, which is why it needs Full Disk Access (macOS protects ~/Library/Messages). It will also read a conversation out of an iPhone or iPad backup made with Finder on the same Mac, encrypted or not.

Limitations, stated plainly. One conversation at a time — there is no bulk export, by design. It cannot recover deleted messages, cannot pull from iCloud, and cannot read a plugged-in phone directly, only a backup. Output is a website, not a PDF; the maker suggests print-to-PDF from the browser if you need one.

$29, one purchase, no subscription, sold direct rather than through the Mac App Store, by Serious Business Software LLC. macOS 15.7 or later, Apple silicon or Intel. The free download exports the last seven days of any thread with no licence key, which is the correct way to sell this: you see the exact output, on your own conversation, before you decide whether it is worth keeping.