Fifteen years of posts, photos and captions are sitting in Meta’s export. Ledgable turns that export into a ledger on a site you own: one page per day, browsable, searchable, yours. It takes an evening, most of it waiting for the download.

What you get

• A day page for every day you ever posted, with the photos, the captions and the timestamps, on your own WordPress site under /ledger/.
• On this day, the same date in every earlier year, and a timeline with filters, and threads that gather one subject across years.
• All of it private by default: only you see it until you decide otherwise. See Keeping your ledger private.
• Nothing rented. The entries are ordinary posts in your database, the photos are files in your uploads folder, and you can leave with them any time.

Step 1: ask Meta for the archive

1. In Facebook or Instagram: Settings → Accounts Centre → Your information and permissions → Download your information.
2. Request your posts, photos and videos.
3. Choose JSON, not HTML. This is the one choice that matters: the HTML export is a website, not data, and cannot be read back. If you already took HTML, request it again.
4. Pick the highest media quality you are willing to wait for. Meta emails you when it is ready, usually within hours, sometimes a day.

Step 2: a site with the plugin

Any WordPress you control. Install the Ledgable plugin, run its setup wizard, and leave the network module off for now. The handbook has the details; a fresh site takes ten minutes.

Step 3: bring it in

1. WordPress → Ledgable → Import. Upload the zip. It goes up in chunks, so a multi-gigabyte archive is fine on an ordinary host.
2. Choose what to do with photos: link them in place (fast, no extra disk), attach them into your media library (self-contained, usually what you want), or offload to storage you configured.
3. Start the job and watch it count. You can close the tab; it keeps going. If it stops halfway, start it again and it resumes where it was.

Very large archives are happier on the command line, where nothing can time out; the handbook lists the wp ledgable import meta commands.

What it fixes for you

• Mangled accents. Meta’s captions arrive double-encoded (café as café). Repaired once, never twice.
• Undated posts. Some reels and grid photos carry no timestamp. They are dated from the export’s own folder structure, never from the file’s download date, so your archive does not pile onto one afternoon.
• Facebook’s narration. “Michael shared a link” is Facebook’s title, not yours; kept for the record, never used as a title.
• Duplicate videos. The same video in the feed and in the videos file becomes one entry.
• Running it twice is safe. Every entry has a stable identity, so a re-run updates and creates nothing new.

Step 4: read it in the app

Connect the site under Settings › Sites and the ledger is there: On this day on the day page, the timeline under The Net, threads to pull. Pick from an old post onto today’s page, or write around it by hand. The past becomes material.

Then leave

Once the ledger is yours, the account it came from is just an account. Delete it or don’t; the years are no longer in it.