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It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

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Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#31

Post by derefr »

gnicholas wrote: post #22

Searching Messages on my Mac is a joke. If type the name of a friend in the search field, it returns (after unreasonable delay) various results, mostly of texts about the person I'm searching for. How does it not realize that it should first search recipient names and present these results first? A search for "Delilah" should not show a bunch of texts about Delilah, obscuring the one thread with my friend Delilah.

I think there’s a separate idiomatic autocomplete flow for what you’re trying to do. Try hitting “New Message”; typing your friend’s name; and selecting the result. The New Message window will transform into the existing-conversation window for that contact.

Not saying having it also work from search wouldn’t be good — but having this flow available is probably why the other issue hasn’t been fixed sooner.

Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#32

Post by nodamage »

If you have Messages set up on a Mac you can access your chat archives under ~/Library/Messages/Archive. Each conversation is stored by date in an .ichat file which can be re-opened in the Messages app.

https://appletoolbox.com/qa-where-are-imessage-files-stored/

Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#33

Post by Someone »

esolyt wrote: post #20
smoldesu wrote: post #14

We need a better communication standard. Apple made a killing selling their proprietary iMessage layer on top of SMS, but we could be actually making changes in this sector if we all used a standardized protocol. At least then we have a documented interface that we can choose to store however we want, or (perhaps wishful thinking) in a modular style. RCS is a great start, but I've already started to put my money on M…

Is it really "on top of SMS" though? The way I see, it's just a messaging app like WhatsApp, Telegram etc but they just combined it with the SMS app on their platform. I am failing to see the additional value of combining them. If Google bought WhatsApp and combined it with the stock SMS app of Android, I don't think I would prefer that.

The additional value for Apple is that their platform had a billion+ users from the start.

Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#34

Post by derefr »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #25

The cynic in me says this is all part of the plan. Sure, we'll give you seemingly impossibly large amounts of cloud storage for free, learn to never delete anything that you ever talk about in your entire life. Ten years down the road, "oh, looks like you need to start paying us monthly for more cloud storage!" I kinda wonder how many Gmail users now pay Google for more storage space just to cover their email archive…

> I kinda wonder how many Gmail users now pay Google for more storage space just to cover their email archive...

Gmail’s storage space has consistently grown over the years to keep up with the average user’s demand.

Google don’t want to do anything — like charging for email storage — that would disincentivize their mass of sensors^H users from feeding them ever more data.

(If you’re an outlier with way more storage than usual, they’ll happily charge you, knowing that the data point you represent is mostly going to get pruned out of their models anyway.)

Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#35

Post by codeulike »

On a similar note, deleting old photos to save space on iCloud is very hard. I could mass-delete photos older than a certain date in the Mac Photos app (or whatever its called these days) using a smart album, but then that mass deletion would not sync to iCloud. Or, I could log into iCloud via a web page and select a load of photos (but not more than 1000 at a time) and delete them - but then it takes ages - like about 20 minutes. Why does it take so long to delete 1000 photos from the cloud? Its unfathomable. And then after deleting them you have to go and find them in the iCloud bin and delete them again - which also takes ages.

I can only conclude that they have made it deliberately very slow and painful to clear space on iCloud. Because they'd rather you paid for more space ...

Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#37

Post by robbyking »

spoonjim wrote: post #8

I save them on the expectation that Apple will someday release a better tool for browsing them. Especially the texts between me and my wife, they are a story of our life from the very first one.

I was in a similar situation with email. In 2005 or so I was migrating to new computer when I found a directory of photos I forgot to back up. Rather than burn them to DVD or upload them to my domain, I decided to just email them to myself. I sent a handful of images, then replied to that same email with the next 10, and so on, until the five dozen or so images were uploaded in a single email thread.

When I went to open the email on my new machine, the loading indicator just spun and spun until finally my browser crashed. When viewing an email conversation, Gmail will display previews of all the emails in the chain, including their attachments, which was causing my browser to crash. Next I tried connecting my Google account to Apple Mail, but Gmail's SMTP server would time out before the attachments were able to download.

After a while I forgot about the photos all together, until I randomly stumbled across them while searching my Gmail account for some other files I had sent myself around that time. At this point it was 2014 or so, and my browser was very easily able to open the messages so I could download the photos, which of course at that point I had zero interest in.

Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#38

Post by laurent92 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #25

The cynic in me says this is all part of the plan. Sure, we'll give you seemingly impossibly large amounts of cloud storage for free, learn to never delete anything that you ever talk about in your entire life. Ten years down the road, "oh, looks like you need to start paying us monthly for more cloud storage!" I kinda wonder how many Gmail users now pay Google for more storage space just to cover their email archive…

They don’t need that, they can just start saving pics in HEIC at 4MB per pic, and backups start exploding.

I use Gimp and generally obtain the same quality with a 450KB JPEG, sometimes 50KB depending on the contents. Images can be remarkably small. They should try increasing the compression ratio until a change is noticeable, but do they care?

Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#39

Post by asdff »

esolyt wrote: post #20
smoldesu wrote: post #14

We need a better communication standard. Apple made a killing selling their proprietary iMessage layer on top of SMS, but we could be actually making changes in this sector if we all used a standardized protocol. At least then we have a documented interface that we can choose to store however we want, or (perhaps wishful thinking) in a modular style. RCS is a great start, but I've already started to put my money on M…

Is it really "on top of SMS" though? The way I see, it's just a messaging app like WhatsApp, Telegram etc but they just combined it with the SMS app on their platform. I am failing to see the additional value of combining them. If Google bought WhatsApp and combined it with the stock SMS app of Android, I don't think I would prefer that.

iMessage is a vestigial product from the days when people had unlimited data but also only 400 text messages a month. It made sense then. It doesn't make much sense now.

Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#40

Post by toomuchtodo »

Apocryphon wrote: post #36

Wish this could be done to Facebook Messenger as well. I have some old conversations spanning over five years that would be nice to export.

https://m.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=101041873...

https://www.facebook.com/help/212802592074644

https://www.facebook.com/help/930396167085762/

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