Where WhatsApp, Telegram and Instagram keep your files, and how to find them

Someone sent you a PDF on WhatsApp last month and now you need it on your computer. Or a video from a Telegram group. You know it’s on your phone somewhere, but chat apps hide their files in folders most file managers don’t show, and the folders have moved over the years.

Here’s where each app keeps its files on Android today, and an easier way to get at all of them.

WhatsApp

Since Android 11, WhatsApp keeps its media in:

Internal storage/Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Media

Inside, you’ll find a folder per kind of file:

Folders	What’s inside
WhatsApp Images	Photos you received (and Sent for ones you sent)
WhatsApp Video	Videos
WhatsApp Documents	PDFs, Word and Excel files and other documents
WhatsApp Audio	Music and audio files
WhatsApp Voice Notes	Voice messages
.Statuses	Statuses you’ve viewed, kept for a short while

Older phones and older WhatsApp versions used Internal storage/WhatsApp/Media instead. WhatsApp Business uses Android/media/com.whatsapp.w4b/WhatsApp Business/Media.

Telegram

Telegram’s own folder is:

Internal storage/Android/media/org.telegram.messenger/Telegram

with subfolders like Telegram Images, Telegram Video, Telegram Audio and Telegram Documents. When you choose Save to gallery or Save to downloads in Telegram, the file goes to a shared folder instead:

• Pictures/Telegram for images
• Movies/Telegram for videos
• Music/Telegram for audio
• Download/Telegram for files

Instagram and X (Twitter)

These save what you download into your shared folders:

• Instagram: Pictures/Instagram, Movies/Instagram, DCIM/Instagram (photos taken in the app) and Download/Instagram.
• X / Twitter: Pictures/Twitter or Pictures/X, Movies/Twitter or Movies/X, and Download/Twitter or Download/X, depending on the app’s version.

The easy way: social folders in Folders

Remembering those paths isn’t much fun. Folders knows them all. Open the side menu, and under Social you’ll find WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram and Twitter.

Tap one, and Folders gathers that app’s files from every folder it uses, old and new locations alike, into one view:

• All files shows everything, newest first, with thumbnails for photos and videos.
• A tab for each kind narrows it down. For WhatsApp, that’s Images, Video, Documents and Animated Gifs, the files people look for most; other apps get tabs like Images, Video and Downloads.
• Each file shows where it really lives, like in WhatsApp Documents, so nothing is hidden.

From there, everything works as in any other folder: open a file, share it, copy it to another folder, send it to your PC over Wi-Fi, or delete what you don’t need any more.

Free up space from chats

Chat apps keep every file you’ve ever received, and group chats add up fast. In a social folder:

1. Open the Video tab first, since videos are the biggest files.
2. Sort by size to see the largest at the top.
3. Select what you don’t need and delete it.

The messages stay in the chat, but media you’ve deleted from storage won’t open there any more, so keep anything you may need again.

For forwarded memes and photos saved more than once, run the duplicate finder on the WhatsApp folder.

On a computer

On Windows and Linux, Folders’ Telegram entry shows the Telegram Desktop folder that the desktop app downloads to.

Questions people ask

Why can’t my old file manager see these folders? Since Android 11, the Android/media folder needs a file manager with full file access, which Folders asks for when you first start it.

Where are voice notes and statuses? Folders’ WhatsApp view sticks to images, videos, documents and GIFs. Voice notes and statuses stay in WhatsApp’s own folders, listed in the table above, and you can open those in Folders like any other folder. (WhatsApp keeps viewed statuses only for a short while.)

Can Folders read my chats? No. It only sees the files the apps saved to storage, the same files any file manager can see. Your messages stay inside the apps.