Media vault (attachment breakdown)
A count of every attachment in a chat, broken down by kind — photo, video, voice note, sticker, GIF, contact card, location pin.
Not every attachment is the same kind of thing, and lumping them into one "media" total hides which kind of sharing actually defines a chat — a friendship built on voice notes looks nothing like one built on stickers, even if the raw attachment counts happen to match. The one wrinkle: on an Android export made "without media," the placeholder text doesn’t always specify which kind of file it was, so some of these end up in a generic "attachments" bucket rather than guessed at.
Example
A chat with 3,272 total attachments might split into 1,319 stickers, 1,266 photos, 583 voice notes, 85 videos, and a handful of contacts and locations — three very different texting habits hiding inside one total.
Frequently asked questions
Why would some attachments show up as just "attachments" with no specific type?+
Android’s "Without Media" export doesn’t always label the placeholder with a specific file type the way iOS does — when the type genuinely can’t be determined from the text alone, it’s counted honestly as unknown rather than guessed at.
Are deleted messages part of the media vault?+
They’re tracked alongside it as their own category, since a deleted message could have been text, a photo, or anything else — the content is gone either way.
Related terms
- "Media omitted" (WhatsApp)The placeholder text WhatsApp writes into an export in place of a photo, video, or voice note when the chat is exported "without media".
- Deleted messages (WhatsApp)A message removed after sending, which WhatsApp leaves a placeholder for in the export — the text itself is gone for everyone, permanently.