Flexibits developed an app to do this search called Chatology (https://flexibits.com/chatology) but they've discontinued it since Big Sur came out. Works pretty well on my Mojave machine.
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
#52I'm just commenting because I also find iMessages to be a completely neglected app considering how central it is to so many people's communications.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Related, I emailed Tim Cook about iPhone sensor future plans, and a high-level exec of like 25+ years wrote back to me within a week. Apple is remarkably good at getting back to cold emails to top execs.
Interesting, perhaps I’ll cold email them about the pinned contact feature in iMessage being totally worthless. If it just pinned the message thread to the top and didn’t change the icon to a giant circle that sometimes doesn’t show notifications, it’d be fine. I pinned my GF’s message thread and I ended up missing lots of messages and notifications from her and ended up unpinning her so the notifications would show…
I found pinned messages on Monday. I've now unpinned things.
It only made things worse :(
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#54Flexibits developed an app to do this search called Chatology ( https://flexibits.com/chatology ) but they've discontinued it since Big Sur came out. Works pretty well on my Mojave machine.
If it’s discontinued and they don’t charge for it I hope they consider open sourcing the solution so others can try to make it functional.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#55The 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 t…
This was previously true. Free storage at Google hasn't increased from 15 GB since 2013. (I have a few promotional bonuses that bring me up to about 19 GB, but it's been that way for... over half a decade without increase.) Personally, my Google storage is mostly full, even though I haven't used Google Drive or Gmail since 2016, and have removed much of my personal content since then.
Also, now they're actually effectively decreasing everyone's storage. Previously, Google Drive document types and Google Photos didn't count towards that 15 GB limit. They will as of June 1st, 2021: https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/
So, while cloud storage usage has exploded over the past eight years, Google's storage limits have not only not expanded to meet it, they've actually begun to tighten the belt.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#56I want a chat app that is: E2EE and allows me to change phone numbers.
I started migrating people to Signal when that whole WhatsApp ToS hullaballoo happened, but now I need to change my phone number and apparently this is not supported in Signal, which is just crazy to me.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#57I 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.
FWIW, it is fairly easy to dump them out of your iTunes backup.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#58On your Mac, iMessages are stored in a SQLite database which you can inspect.
https://spin.atomicobject.com/2020/05/22/search-imessage-sql...
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#59Flexibits developed an app to do this search called Chatology ( https://flexibits.com/chatology ) but they've discontinued it since Big Sur came out. Works pretty well on my Mojave machine.
It unfortunately doesn't work well if you've enabled Messages in iCloud [1]. You can only search the messages that're in your device's local cache. Which isn't actively cleared much, that I've seen, but it does mean that it's not very helpful for any messages that predate the current install of your OS.
I'd assume this is why they discontinued it, rather than adapt it to the new from-iOS Messages in Big Sur.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#60On 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 abo…
> 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.
Why wouldn’t it sync? If I did this right now, my expectation is that it would sync. Is there a limitation in how this works?