The quickest way
- Open this page in Safari, Chrome or Firefox.
- Open Finder and go to Downloads (or wherever you saved the export).
- Drag the file ending in
_export.taronto the box on this page, or press Choose your export and pick it.
The conversations appear straight away. There is no need to unpack the file first.
If you double-clicked it already
macOS unpacks a .tar when you double-click it, making a folder next to it. That's fine: choose the folder with Choose a folder, or choose the messages.json file inside it. To see photos too, include the media folder, or choose the whole unpacked folder.
Is it private?
Yes. The page reads the file with your browser, on your Mac. Nothing from the export is uploaded, and closing the tab clears it from memory. If you'd like to check, open Safari's Web Inspector (or Chrome's developer tools), go to the Network tab, and open your export: you will see no upload.
Very large exports
A Mac with 8 GB of memory comfortably opens exports with hundreds of thousands of messages. Photos are read from the file only when you scroll to them, so a large files export doesn't fill your memory.
Old Skype on a Mac
Before 2017, Skype for Mac kept history in a file called main.db inside ~/Library/Application Support/Skype/yourname/. If you still have one from an old Mac or a Time Machine backup, see opening an old main.db.