There is a particular kind of annoyance that hits when you need Telegram data in a hurry. You are in a group with a few thousand people, or a channel full of photos, and you want a member list or all the media in a folder. Telegram will let you have it, eventually, but the path is not obvious and the built in tools are shaped for backups, not for the small targeted export you actually want.
I have done this enough times that I have a mental decision tree now. This post is that tree, focused on the two things people ask for most: a clean list of who is in a group, and the media out of a chat or channel.
Know what "have access to" means
Before anything, the rule that governs all of this: you can export what your own account can already see. Members of a group you are in, messages in chats you are part of, media in channels you follow. You cannot conjure participant lists that a channel hides, or pull from places you have not joined. Any tool promising otherwise is selling you a ban risk. Keep exports to data you legitimately have in front of you, and keep the downstream use lawful.
Getting the member list
Say you run a 5,000 person community and you want a roster with usernames and ids, maybe to cross reference against your CRM or just to see who is actually active.
The Telegram Desktop export (Settings, Advanced, Export Telegram data) is the official path, but it is built for a full account archive. You get a big JSON or an HTML dump, and carving one group's members out of it is more work than it should be.
The faster path is to read the participant list directly. Telegram exposes it through the client API, so anything speaking MTProto can page through participants and hand you name, username, id, and role. If you write code, GramJS or Telethon will do it in a dozen lines. If you do not want to write code, a browser extension that connects with your own API credentials will do the same paging for you and drop a file at the end.
Whichever way you go, the output you want looks like this:
{"user_id": 204817, "username": "ana_growth", "name": "Ana", "role": "admin"}
{"user_id": 512044, "username": "dvd", "name": "Davide", "role": "member"}
JSONL like that is my default for anything over a few hundred rows, because it streams cleanly into scripts and databases. CSV is nicer if a non technical teammate is going to open it in Sheets.
Getting the media
Media is where the manual approach really falls apart. Right clicking and saving four hundred photos is not a plan. You want the whole set, with each file still tied to the message it came from, so a picture is not just IMG_0421.jpg with no context.
Two things make bulk media painless:
- Preserve the reference. A good export keeps sender, timestamp, and source chat next to each downloaded file, so you can rebuild who posted what.
- Respect the rate limits. Telegram throttles hard, and hitting it triggers a FLOOD_WAIT that pauses you for a set number of seconds. Any serious downloader needs backoff built in, or you will spend the afternoon babysitting errors.
Web mode versus API mode
If you use a browser tool for either of the above, you will usually see two modes, and it is worth understanding the difference because it decides what you can pull.
Web mode reads what Telegram Web has already rendered in the page. Zero setup, good for the messages in an open chat and your recent contacts. It is limited to what is on screen, same as the WhatsApp side of things.
API mode (sometimes called power mode) uses your own api_id and api_hash from my.telegram.org to talk to Telegram over MTProto. This is what unlocks full member lists, mutual groups, and bulk media, because it is not limited to the rendered DOM. Your credentials stay local to your machine. This is the mode you want for the two tasks above.
The extension I reach for when I do not feel like scripting is Mastros. Being straight with you: it is a commercial product with a free tier, not an open library, so if you want to read or self host the code, GramJS is the honest recommendation instead. What the extension saves you is the plumbing: paging participants, FLOOD_WAIT backoff, keeping media matched to messages, and writing it all out as CSV, JSON, or JSONL. One quota detail if you try it: each media file counts as one message against the monthly allowance, so a big channel archive adds up quicker than a text only export.
The short version
- Need one group's members: page the participant list over the API, either with GramJS or a no-code tool, and export JSONL or CSV.
- Need the media: use an API mode downloader that keeps each file tied to its message and handles rate limits for you.
- Need a full account backup and nothing targeted: Telegram Desktop export is genuinely fine.
- Grab your api_id and api_hash from my.telegram.org first if you are going the API route, and keep your exports to data you actually have access to.
If the no-code route fits, the Telegram exporter is here: https://www.mastros.online/telegram-scraper. I wrote up the WhatsApp equivalent in a separate post, since WhatsApp gives you a lot less to work with.
