ChatGPT & Claude Export Converter — ZIP to Markdown Files

ChatGPT: Settings → Data controls → Export data. OpenAI emails you a link, usually within hours; it expires 24 hours after it arrives.

Claude: Settings → Privacy → Export data, on the web or desktop app. Claude also emails a link that expires after 24 hours.

Drop the ZIP here as it is. The converter finds conversations.json inside and ignores everything else. You can also drop conversations.json on its own, or paste JSON for a single conversation.

ChatGPT stores a conversation as a tree, not a sequence. Every time you edit a prompt or regenerate an answer, the conversation branches, and both the old and new versions stay in the file. A naive converter that walks the `mapping` object and prints everything it finds will give you every abandoned draft interleaved with the thread you actually kept — which is worse than the raw JSON, because it looks correct.

This one starts at `current_node` — the tip of the branch you were last on — and walks up through each message's parent to the root, then reverses. That yields exactly the thread you'd see on screen, and silently drops the branches you abandoned. It's the same walk ChatPeer's own export does.

One file per conversation, named like `2026-09-01 Stripe webhook retries.md` so they sort by date, with duplicates numbered rather than overwritten.

Markdown files open with YAML frontmatter: title, platform, conversation ID, created, updated and exported dates, message count and tags. Obsidian's Dataview can query them straight away, and the keys match the ChatPeer extension's own exporter, so files from both sit happily in one vault. Each message sits under a `## You`, `## ChatGPT` or `## Claude` heading.

Plain text drops the syntax: the title underlined, then `[You]` and `[ChatGPT]` or `[Claude]` labels above each message.

The model's hidden reasoning, tool calls and system messages are left out; images and attachments are marked `[attachment]` where they appeared. Message text itself is never altered.

There is no upload step and no server to upload to. The ZIP is opened, parsed and rebuilt in JavaScript in the tab you're reading this in. Close the tab and nothing persists.

That's the same rule the extension follows — see what we store and what we don't — and it matters more than usual here, because a full export tends to contain a great deal you would not want to hand to a stranger's server in exchange for a file conversion. If you'd rather export conversations one at a time as you go, ChatPeer adds an Export button to both ChatGPT and Claude.