Hangouts Reader

While Google does allow you to backup your message history on Hangout, the backup file (Hangouts.json) is close to impossible for anyone to read, Hangouts Reader parses it and makes everything more presentable so you can still your message history anytime offline.

Note: Hangout Reader only reads the file you upload and makes its content inside more presentable. It doesn't violate your privacy as nothing is uploaded or saved in any external server.

Try it here!

Features

Everything is done offline (except when showing user profile pictures and photos with the URLs in Hangouts.json)
No matter how large your Hangouts.json is, it can still process it really fast. (4 seconds to parse a 65mb file, for instance)
User friendly and easy to run on your computer, if you are really worried about Hangout Reader keeping your data or sharing it to someone/something else, which I assure you it doesn't.
Offers a table mode if you want to view message history in a neat and tidy way.
Flexible configuration.

How to use

Visit Google Takeout then click "Select none" and only check the box next to Hangouts.
Within a few minutes or so you will recieve a zip file with Hangouts.json inside it.
Extract the file and choose it above. if you have a very large chat history it can take a few minutes to load the file.

Can I use it locally?

Yes, but you may experience issues getting the profile images of everyone because CORS request failure. Overall, the behavior is 90% the same.

Method 1

If you open index.html directly, Chrome and Firefox 1 will lead to a security error because Hangout Reader has a web worker.

If you don't want to follow along the long instructions below in method 2, you can directly open the index.html in the folder offline_version instead, it has far few features and can be very slow, but it spares you the trouble of installing this and that, stuff that only computer nerd enjoys.

Method 2 (Recommended)

Make sure you have npm installed on your computer.
Make sure you have webpack and webpack-dev-server installed globally (I'm still using Webpack 1). If not, run these commands on terminal(Linux/Mac) or command prompt (Windows).

npm install -g webpack@^1.12.9

npm install -g webpack-dev-server@^1.4.7

Download this repo either with this link or git clone.

git clone https://github.com/kevguy/Hangout-Reader

Inside the project folder, run this command to install everything Hangout Reader needs:

npm install

Run the command webpack-dev-server

zoghal / Hangout-Reader