How to export your X (Twitter) likes

Request your archive

1. On x.com, open Settings and choose Your account.
2. Choose Download an archive of your data and request it.
3. Wait. Preparing the archive takes anywhere from hours to days.
4. When it is ready, download the ZIP from the same settings page.

The download is a ZIP. For an account with a long history it can be very large, because it holds every post, message and media file you have sent, not only your likes.

Find the likes

Unzip the archive and open the data folder. Your likes are in a file called like.js. A large archive splits it into like-part1.js, like-part2.js and so on.

data/like.js

The file is JSON behind one line of JavaScript. Each like has three things: the post id, the text of the post and a link to it. Open it in any text editor and you can read it, though a few thousand likes is a long read.

What the archive leaves out

If you came for bookmarks, the archive will not help. The honest answer is that X does not export them.

• Bookmarks. They are not in the archive.
• The date you liked a post. The file does not say when. The post’s own date can be worked out from its id, and that is the only date you get.
• Images and video. The likes file holds text and a link, not the media.
• The author’s name as a separate field. The link and the text are what you have.

Turn the file into something you can search

A text file of links is a record, not a library. To search it you need to put it somewhere that reads it.

Curatively’s iPhone app reads the archive directly. Open Account, choose Import from another app and pick your X archive. If the ZIP is too big to open on the phone, unzip it first and choose data/like.js. You see a preview before anything is saved. Each like becomes a private save with its link and the text of the post, dated by when the post was published. The import skips posts you already have, and Undo this import takes the whole batch back out.

More on what the import keeps and does not keep is on the X likes export page.