help with Skype history (mac)

[Searsison 8]

im wondering if anyone can give me some tips here, Im getting the final bits of evidence together ready to send off with the K1 package and to my surprise trying to look through my skype history is an absolute nightmare as a mac user, the app lets me jump back up to a year but in doing so it crashes like crazy until eventually it will load everything but will be so slow to scroll through and because me and my fiance have used Skype since day 1 for all of our chats about 80% is going to be irrelevant information that the USCIS wont care about seeing ie links, photos of no real importance and generally a lot of rubbish that we like to talk about day to day. i understand windows users have access to some nice 3rd party software for viewing history but im not really finding anything useful for a mac user as of yet and if im to screenshot enough i think im going to be here all night and go through a hell of a lot of coffee in the process

as my fiance is from the UK is it relevant for us to even frontload our petition with such info? or will our evidence of 2 visits this year along with a few pages of facebook wall-to-wall posts be enough alone to convince them?

any advice is much appreciated, in the meantime ill be trawling very slowly through our history

[lost_at_sea 995]

You don't need to "front-load" for London. One of the easiest embassies.

If you've already got other good bits of evidence for your ongoing relationship, don't stress the skype logs. Also, they don't need EVERYTHING, so you could screen shot a sample of dates spanning your relationship.

What are you sending for your meeting evidence?

Edited November 28, 2013 by lost_at_sea

[Searsison 8]

thats definitely a relief! well our first meeting we didnt think to retain anything like boarding passes which we really regret now and because he came to visit and we stayed at a family members empty house we didnt have anything like hotel receipts or restaurant receipts at all as we done everything ourselves from the home so we only have a few photos and his itinery for the flights and passport stamp for that visit but the most recent one we made more of a concious effort to collect things so we have boarding passes now and a few restaurant receipts and we also got a lot of photos of him with my family this time which ive heard is a massive help. all of that as well as the 5 or 6 pages of facebook posts to one another is the lot really, we also included email receipts for my trip which is planned next year to visit london, i know its not solid proof but i thought that would also look good in there. what do you think?

[Jeanna 21]

What about phone logs? Even if historically an embassy does not require a lot, I always like to err on the side of caution. I'm an over-preparer. lol

Also, in Skype, you do not need to show actual conversations just that they occured. Does it show a log of convos like in a cell phone for calls? All incoming and outgoing with dates and possibly times? That would be sufficient. They do not need to see the substance of the conversations.

For example, I sent call and text logs for the 6 months preceding our application and the same for when we went to our visa appointment at the embassy. We were approved and I do feel they like seeing a lot of proof and seeing you took the time to do it. Just my opinion; I'm sure some one else will come along and be snarky about it.

[lost_at_sea 995]

thats definitely a relief! well our first meeting we didnt think to retain anything like boarding passes which we really regret now and because he came to visit and we stayed at a family members empty house we didnt have anything like hotel receipts or restaurant receipts at all as we done everything ourselves from the home so we only have a few photos and his itinery for the flights and passport stamp for that visit but the most recent one we made more of a concious effort to collect things so we have boarding passes now and a few restaurant receipts and we also got a lot of photos of him with my family this time which ive heard is a massive help. all of that as well as the 5 or 6 pages of facebook posts to one another is the lot really, we also included email receipts for my trip which is planned next year to visit london, i know its not solid proof but i thought that would also look good in there. what do you think?

Your meeting evidence sounds good!

No harm including emails/receipts about your future plans, although they may just ignore it.

[Searsison 8]

thanks to you both for your input thats actually a good question about Skype logging the convos i was wondering that myself, it just appears to archive every conversation together into a huge feed under each contact which i guess is why it crashes so badly when trying to pull up old info, it seems stupid and i really hope there is a way to view the logs themselves and not the actual conversations, i guess its my fault in the first place for being a Mac user (boo!)

[lost_at_sea 995]

thanks to you both for your input thats actually a good question about Skype logging the convos i was wondering that myself, it just appears to archive every conversation together into a huge feed under each contact which i guess is why it crashes so badly when trying to pull up old info, it seems stupid and i really hope there is a way to view the logs themselves and not the actual conversations, i guess its my fault in the first place for being a Mac user (boo!)

I'm a mac user too. It's okay.

Just thought I'd go see if I can see logs of calls only, instead of full chat history, and I just managed to get a screen that shows just call start/stop and durations. I'm in Skype v6.0 though, which I don't think is the current version. Just in case, got there by clicking "history" in the right hand panel, then opening up someone I wanted to see, then clicking the "All" under the "View earlier messages" in the area above.

Although, it doesn't show me any IM messages, because I think I reinstalled skype a few times - I guess it only preserves call history if you don't bother to also try and save chat history? I bet if you installed Skype on a new machine, you'd just get call history and no chat history....

https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA10888/how-do-i-see-my-chat-history-in-skype-for-mac-os-x

[Nich-Nick 3,354]

thanks to you both for your input thats actually a good question about Skype logging the convos i was wondering that myself, it just appears to archive every conversation together into a huge feed under each contact which i guess is why it crashes so badly when trying to pull up old info, it seems stupid and i really hope there is a way to view the logs themselves and not the actual conversations, i guess its my fault in the first place for being a Mac user (boo!)

Seriously....skip everything Skype.

[DHG 1]

On my mac I just zoomed out on the screen so small but legible then took a screen shot that showed either where we had a call or two or chat, just did one screen shot per month. I used that for initial proof of relationship as well as ongoing for fiancees interview with embassy and had no problem at all.

[Shelbym 2]

When I went through my Skype messages, I found the easiest thing to do was to slowly increase the time, if that makes sense. Do one week, then two weeks, then one month, etc. If you do it pieces at a time, Skype is less likely to crash.