Facebook data viewer
Free Facebook data viewer, no account: your JSON export’s posts, comments, friends and Messenger chats become searchable tables — the file is never uploaded.
…or drop your Facebook export here — the ZIP files as you downloaded them (JSON format), the unzipped folder, or the .json files inside.
Nothing is uploaded: the file is read by JavaScript in this browser tab and stays on your device. Photos and videos in the export are skipped; only the .json files are read. Several ZIP files can be dropped together. Drop them anywhere on the page.
How to view your Facebook data (JSON export)
- Request the export: Settings & privacy → Settings → Meta Account / Accounts Center → Your information and permissions → Export your information → Create export, pick your profile, then Export to device (Facebook Help, Export a copy of your Facebook information).
- Choose JSON as the format, then Start export.
- When the export is ready, download it from Available downloads within 4 days; a large export comes as several ZIP files.
- Drop the ZIP (or all of them at once) here or click Choose file; if it is unzipped, use Choose folder.
- Each list gets a tab: filter it with Find in this list, click a column header to sort, then Download CSV or Copy for Excel / Sheets.
What is in a Facebook data export
The JSON export is a ZIP of folders — your_facebook_activity (posts, comments_and_reactions, messages, groups, events, saved_items_and_collections and more), connections, personal_information, logged_information, security_and_login_information, ads_information, apps_and_websites_off_of_facebook — with one .json file per list and folders of media. Every list in every .json file becomes its own tab, named after the file; a list split over several numbered files is joined into one tab, and older exports with a different folder layout are read the same way. In exports we have tested this covers posts, comments, likes and reactions, friends, followers, friend requests, groups and group posts, events, pages you follow, saved items, searches, notifications, login and account activity, advertisers using your information, the profile fields and the Messenger chats, one tab per chat.
The viewer shows Facebook’s Unix timestamps as dates and times in UTC, decodes its escaped emoji and accented letters (“é” for é), and lists photos and videos by their paths and captions; it never fetches anything from Facebook.
Is my Facebook data uploaded?
No: the file is read by JavaScript in your browser, and a ZIP is unpacked there too, with the browser’s own decompression; only its .json entries are read — the media files inside stay untouched. The site’s host, GitHub Pages, logs the IP address of every visitor for security, like any web server — details on the privacy page. Because the file stays with you, the viewer works on a phone as well as on a laptop, and keeps working offline once the page has loaded.
Summary tab: counts, dates and busiest hours
The Summary tab draws two small charts for the largest dated list (often your likes and reactions, or the messages of your busiest chat) — records by hour of the day and by weekday, in UTC as the timestamps in the file — and below them lists every section with its number of records and its first and last date.
JSON, not HTML: which format to request
Facebook offers two formats: HTML, in Facebook’s words a ZIP “containing an HTML file named index that you can open in a web browser”, which this viewer does not read, and JSON, “a machine readable format of your information”, which it turns into tables. Media quality only changes the size of the download — “if you choose a higher quality version of your media, your download will be larger” — since the viewer ignores the photos and videos anyway.
Facts checked on 25 September 2026 against Facebook’s help page “Export a copy of your Facebook information”: facebook.com/help/212802592074644; see also “Access and download your information”, facebook.com/help/1701730696756992. The layout of the JSON export is described from files we have tested; Meta changes folder and field names over time, which is why the viewer reads whatever lists it finds. DataExportViewer is an independent tool, not affiliated with Facebook or Meta.
Other exports?
FAQ
How do I download my Facebook data?
On Facebook: Settings & privacy → Settings → Meta Account (or Accounts Center) → Your information and permissions → Export your information (or Download your information) → Create export → choose your profile → Export to device → choose the information, a date range, the format (pick JSON) and media quality → Start export. Facebook says that “when your export is ready, you’ll have 4 days to export your information in the Available downloads section”, and that the request “will expire after a few days, and you can always request a new one”. Then drop the ZIP files on this page.
HTML or JSON — which format should I choose for the Facebook download?
JSON. Facebook calls it “a machine readable format of your information”: one .json file per list, which this viewer turns into searchable tables with CSV export. The HTML format is a ZIP with an index page that opens in a browser by itself, with nothing to search or export, and this page does not read it; if you already have an HTML export, request the download again with JSON selected.
Is my Facebook data uploaded to a server?
No: the ZIP or .json files are read by JavaScript in your browser; no server receives them, nothing is stored, and the page sets no cookies. To check, open your browser’s developer tools on the Network tab while you drop the file: no request carries it. The host, GitHub Pages, logs visitor IP addresses for security — see the privacy page.
Can I see my Messenger messages in the export?
Yes, if you included messages when you requested the export. They are in the messages folder, one subfolder per chat with a message_1.json (and message_2.json and so on for long chats). The viewer joins the numbered parts and shows one tab per chat, named after the chat, with the sender, time and text of every message and the paths of any photos sent; you can search a chat by word and download it as CSV.
Can I use this as a Facebook Messenger JSON viewer?
Yes: drop the whole export, the messages folder, or a single message_1.json, and each chat becomes a tab named after the chat, with one row per message — sender, time (as a date, not a timestamp), text, reactions and the path of any photo, video or sticker sent. It is a table rather than chat bubbles, which is what makes it searchable: type a word or a name in Find in this list, sort by time, and download the whole chat or the matching rows as CSV. Nothing is uploaded, so it is also the way to read a chat on a phone.
How do I open a Facebook JSON file?
Drop it on this page: every list in it becomes a table with the timestamps as dates and the text decoded. In a text editor the same file is one long line of braces, Unix timestamps and escaped letters. You can drop one file (your_friends.json, comments.json), a folder, or the ZIP as downloaded; the viewer reads only the .json entries and skips the photos and videos.
Why are the times different from what I saw on Facebook?
Because the viewer shows them in UTC: Facebook writes every time in the export as a Unix timestamp — a number of seconds since 1 January 1970, with no time zone — and the viewer converts it to a date and time in UTC. The difference from your local time is exactly your time zone offset; the Summary charts by hour and weekday use the same UTC times.
Emoji and accented letters look broken in the file — why are they fine here?
Facebook’s JSON writes non-English letters and emoji as escaped bytes, one escape per byte, so “café” appears as “café” in a text editor and an emoji as four escapes. The viewer puts the bytes back together, so names, posts and messages read as typed. Nothing else in the text is changed.
Where are my photos and videos?
In the export, as image and video files in the media folders next to the .json files. This page shows lists, not pictures: a post’s row gives the date, text, caption and the path of each attached file inside the ZIP, and you can open the files themselves from the unzipped folder. To make the download smaller, request the export without media or with lower media quality — the lists are the same.
The download came as several ZIP files — which one do I open?
All of them, together: select them all in Choose file or drop them on the page at once. The viewer reads every ZIP, joins lists that are split across them (numbered files like your_posts_1.json and your_posts_2.json) and shows one set of tabs. If a ZIP is larger than 4 GB the ZIP64 format is not supported in the browser: unzip it and drop the folder instead.
How do I find everything from one year, or one person?
Type in Find in this list: it filters the current tab as you type, across all columns, and the status line says how many records match. Dates are shown as “2019-03-14 …”, so typing “2019-” keeps only that year, and typing a name keeps only the rows that mention it. Click a column header to sort (again to reverse; numbers sort as numbers, dates as written), and Download CSV exports only the matching rows, in the sorted order.