Update: OpenAI has now added an export button in its interface but it exports all your chats at once, not one by one. Using the methods below, you can even save or export individual chats.
TL; DR
To export chats, install the AIPRM chrome extension. It adds a button to export chat to the ChatGPT sidebar. You can click this button to download your chat so far. It saves your chat in the markdown format which can be viewed in any markdown viewer online. Jump straight to learn to save a ChatGPT conversation.
Introduction
ChatGPT is mind-blowing. It boasts wonderful capabilities but lacks a very basic feature: an export button to save a conversation.
Users can’t export their chats out of ChatGPTs interface, at least not without jumping through some hoops and installing a bunch of extensions on their browsers.
This is frustrating. What is the use of extracting a finely-tuned goldmine of knowledge if you can’t save it for offline use? This is not to say that OpenAI doesn’t save your chats. It does but it doesn’t make them easy to recall.
The lack of a search button makes matters even worse. Users have no way to comb through their chat history to find exactly what they want.
Imagine for a moment, you are writing a step-by-step essay or cranking out tweets for a Tweetstorm using ChatGPT, then you have no choice but to manually copy and paste ChatGPT’s responses one at a time.
The problem magnifies even further because you can’t use a single conversation for too long as ChatGPT’s response starts going downhill after a while. It gives more weightage to recent prompts so its responses might lose context of what you asked it 30-messages ago.
So what do you do if you are using ChatGPT for a big research project? Scan thousands of messages strewn around different chats? Remember, you don’t have a search button.
In this article, I will address this problem and look at a few things you can do to save your chats with ChatGPT.
What doesn’t work
Let’s start by having a look at the things that I have tried (and failed at) to save a ChatGPT conversation —
Converting the webpage to pdf
The first sensible option was to convert the webpage to a pdf document. I did this using the web browser’s built-in print function. You can print to pdf a webpage to convert it into a pdf.
However, ChatGPT stumped me. It saved only 1 page in pdf, the area of the webpage that was in the viewport when I hit the ‘print’ button.
Darn!
PrintFriendly chrome extension
I knew it was time to bring out the big guns so I installed the PrintFriendly chrome extension.
PrintFriendly helps you print (or save to pdf) any webpage in a neat, clutter-free manner. I was hopeful that this would work because printing web documents is its forte.
It didn’t.
It too printed only the page in the viewport.
Checking out the page source of ChatGPT’s website
I was super disappointed and a little frustrated by now.
As a last resort, I tried to copy and paste the chat from the source code of ChatGPT’s web page.
If you don’t know, when you right-click on any webpage, you get an option to view the HTML source code of the entire webpage.
All the content that is visible on a webpage should be present in the source code which looks like this —
I was, however, disappointed to find out that the chats were not available here either.
Asking ChatGPT
When nothing else worked, I turned to ChatGPT to suggest me some ways to copy or export chats with it.
It confirmed my worst fears. There’s no way, presently, to export your chats right from ChatGPT’s website.
How to save ChatGPT conversation?
You have these options —
Install the AIRPM chrome extension
There’s a chrome extension called AIPRM which stands for AI Prompt Manager.
Once enabled, it will add a few buttons to your ChatGPT interface and a few in the sidebar of ChatGPT.
It has a button that says “Export Chat”. Click this button to save your chat so far. It downloads the chat in a format called “markdown”. You can use a markdown viewer or notepad to view this file.
Note that it only downloads the current chat, not all of your past chats. If you want to save them, you’ll have to manually click on them and download them.
By the way, the AIPRM extension does more than just export your chats. People at AIPRM have built a community around the best ChatGPT prompts. Even your ChatGPT interface will get a makeover after installing this extension.
Give it a try. You can learn more about this extension on the AIPRM website.
Save the webpage to a .mhtml file
Another option is to save the entire webpage to a .mhtml file.
Keep in mind that Safari does not allow you to save a webpage in .mhtml format so you will have to use any Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Edge, or Opera) for the next steps.
In the browser, you can right-click on any webpage. You will find one option “save as” or “save page as” which looks like this —
Click this option. You will be prompted with a save dialogue box, where you have to choose one of the three options: HTML only (.html, .htm), Single file (.mhtml), and Webpage complete (.html, .htm).
Select the second option — *.mhtml. Give your file an appropriate name and click ‘save’.
Your file will be saved on your computer which you can open in any web browser (even offline) or send someone through email or chat. And yes, it does allow text to be copied, unlike some options that I list below.
If you want, you can also convert this mhtml file to a pdf using a converter. I used this and it worked perfectly. Just remember that results might not be very pretty if your chat contains code or markdown tables.
If this method doesn’t work for you, there are still a few things you might try —
Install a chrome extension
There’s a chrome extension called ChatGPT Export and Share which claims to support chat exports in pdf.
It puts three buttons in ChatGPT to share your chat as PNG, PDF or as a link.
The process to install this extension is a bit tricky since it is not yet available at the official chrome store but there’s an excellent step-by-step guide on its GitHub page.
I tried this extension but found it buggy. The buttons kept shaking very fast which made the webpage unresponsive.
Ask ChatGPT to write your chat verbatim
Well, you can always ask ChatGPT to rewrite your entire chat history verbatim.
This prompt reproduced only a few messages before ChatGPT started hallucinating. It wrote even those things that I had never asked.
Give it a try and see what happens. And try it on a fresh chat, rather than an old one.
If it does start writing your chats verbatim, it might stop after writing about 600 words because of the cap on the number of characters ChatGPT can write in a single output.
Politely ask it to ‘continue’ and it’ll just pick up where it left off.
Copy and Paste into Google docs
If none of the above works, old-fashioned copy and paste is your best bet.
You can do this in two ways —
Copy chats immediately: When researching with ChatGPT, open a new document in Google docs in a new tab and then copy and paste chats that are important to you.
Copy entire chat history: Selecting all (ctrl+a or cmd+a) won’t be effective as it will also select the content in the left sidebar.
Do this instead: Scroll to the top of the chat and left-click at the beginning of your very first prompt. Then scroll to the bottom, press shift on the keyboard, and then left-click to the very last character in chat.
Your entire chat history will be selected which you can then copy and paste anywhere.
You will however lose some formatting in this process.
Take a scrolling screenshot
You can always take screenshots of chats that are important to you. One downside of this approach is that you lose the copying functionality.
If you want to capture a single webpage (maybe to post on Twitter), Lightshot is best. I use it for all screenshots on this blog.
However, if you want to capture the entire chat history, then you have to take a scrolling screenshot that will capture the entire webpage from top to bottom.
You can use ShareX on Windows and Shottr on Mac to capture scrolling screenshots. You can use the built-in screenshot software of Windows and Mac as well.
And yes, all 3 apps are absolutely free to use.
Use a screen recorder
This may border on a little crazy but if you find scrolling screenshots troublesome, you can turn on the built-in screen recorder of your computer.
It will also help you reference the research you are doing outside of ChatGPT on other websites.
Conclusion
In this article, I examined the issue of saving or exporting ChatGPT conversation.
OpenAI has made it difficult to export your chats, so we have to hack our way through to save them for later use.
Saving ChatGPT conversation in the ‘.mhtml’ file is your best bet that gives you the best of both worlds. You can share this file with someone and you don’t lose the functionality to copy text.
Other options are either to manually copy and paste into Google docs or take screenshots both of which I find quite tedious.
I hope you found this article useful. Thanks for reading!