Skype Data Viewer

An application for parsing data package provided by Microsoft after Skype was discontinued. It provides basic functionality to parse and display a list of conversations and messages within a selected conversation.

Compilation

Clone the repository and don't forget to initialize and update the submodules.

• Windows: you will need CMake. I personally built the app with CMake and MVS 2022 Community. Windows is the main development platform.
• Mac OS: you will need CMake. Build and the app were tested on Mac OS 15 Sequoia and latest XCode.
• Linux: no surprises -- CMake. However, to compile the GLFW, you will need to install OpenGL, X11 and Wayland libs. I rarely use non-headless Linux, so only tested on Ubuntu 24 LTS. I had hard times linking against OpenGL but these packages worked for me:

    sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends \
    libgl1-mesa-dev \
    libglu1-mesa-dev \
    freeglut3-dev

  For GLFW you will need sudo apt install libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev xorg-dev or follow instructions for your distribution.

After that, run the usual generation and build steps with CMake.

Usage

Unpack your data archive to a directory of your choice.
Launch the compiled app and click "Open folder". Locate the folder with unarchived data and open it. The application expects that folder contains messages.json and a media folder with video and image files alongside their JSON descriptors.
After data is loaded, you will have access to the list of chats and their contents. You can right-click a chat name to copy json source of its data (excluding json for message list). Same applies to messages in the right pane, but you can also copy the message text itself. There are filter options above both panes, which should be self-explanatory once you try them.

Messages may have cyan markers:

• A triangle in the upper-right corner indicates that the message has (un)processed properties in its JSON.
• A circle in the bottom-left indicates that the message has been edited. Edited messages are not fully supported yet, so the edited message may appear alongside the original one, but always afterward.

There is no support for media preview in conversations yet, but you can still open the file if it is present in the media cache. A message containing media data will have background without rounded corners and will read "Left click to open: %file name as perceived in conversation%"

Notes

The application will download fonts for itself and place them next to the executable. You may replace them with your own. I only needed Latin, Cyrillic, and Japanese glyphs, so the app currently supports only those languages. If you need to add more, refer to Dear ImGui docs about fonts and this location in the source code.

The extract_schema.py Python script can be used to determine the schema of the JSON data in your messages.json.