Why your photos are missing
In AT Protocol, images and videos are "blobs" — stored outside your repository and referenced by a content hash. Your .car export contains the references, not the files. It is not a bug; the repository format is designed that way.
The practical result is that people export their data, see a reassuringly large file, and only discover years later that none of their pictures were in it.
What you get
- Every image and video from every post, at full resolution as uploaded.
- Your profile avatar and banner.
- Files named by date and post, so a picture is never orphaned from the thing you wrote about it.
- Folders by year, so a decade of posting stays navigable.
- A note listing anything that could not be retrieved, rather than a silently incomplete folder.
How it works
Your browser fetches each file directly from the server that hosts your account and packs them into a zip on your device. Nothing passes through us — which is why there is no upload wait and no size limit.
Downloads run a few at a time with automatic retry and back-off, so a large account does not hammer your server or trip its rate limits.
Do this before you delete anything
Blob URLs stop working when the account goes. If you are planning to delete your account or migrate to another server, download the media first — it cannot be recovered afterwards.
Questions
- How long does it take?
- It depends on how much media you have. Expect a few minutes for a couple of thousand files. The archive view tells you the exact count and total size before you start.
- Are the images compressed?
- No. You get the stored blob exactly as it is, byte for byte.