{"id":36300,"date":"2022-06-22T16:44:09","date_gmt":"2022-06-22T20:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=36300"},"modified":"2023-01-19T16:00:06","modified_gmt":"2023-01-19T21:00:06","slug":"limiting-imessages-disk-usage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/22\/limiting-imessages-disk-usage\/","title":{"rendered":"Limiting iMessage’s Disk Usage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Troughton-Smith<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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It blows my mind that Apple lets Messages-in-the-cloud suck up all the available local storage without giving you any real way to cap or reduce its size on disk without deleting the masters in iCloud. Can’t uninstall either. This is the real scam making 64GB iPads unworkable.<\/p>\n

This bs is literally an OS upgrade blocker, would prevent you from getting security updates.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I ran into this recently as well. There are some controls in Settings to delete Top Conversations<\/strong> or Photos<\/strong>\/Videos<\/strong> attachments, but those delete the content from Messages in iCloud, too. What if you just want to prune the local cache?<\/p>\n

If you do decide to delete select attachments completely using Settings, I’ve found this to be buggy. After deleting some items, the list doesn’t refresh to show more, so you can’t delete any more even though there are still GBs on the phone.<\/p>\n

Deleting from the Mac is also buggy. You can open a conversation’s info and bulk-select thumbnails—much easier than on an iPhone—but pressing Delete doesn’t actually bulk-delete them. It seems to only delete one attachment, and not always the first one selected.<\/p>\n

The only reliable way that I’ve found to prune Message’s storage use is to set it to only Keep Messages<\/strong> for One Year<\/strong>. (It would be nice to be able to keep a bit more conversation history, but the only longer option is Forever<\/strong>.) Plain text messages, which take up very little space, get deleted, too, even though you really only wanted to free up space by deleting large attachments. And the messages are removed from the cloud and all devices, not just from the one that had limited storage.<\/p>\n

What if you want to make a backup before deleting them from your iPhone—which will, via syncing, also delete them from your Mac? The Messages app has no export feature. There used to be a limited feature for automatically saving chat transcripts, but this was never in the iOS version, and Apple removed it from the Mac version when rewriting Messages using Catalyst.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n