After years of herding imessages i went ahead and deleted everything older than a year.
i encourage othes to consider doing the same. its been great for me.
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
#92Apple's chat.db has an esoteric schema owing to the fact they never designed it from the ground up and instead kept adding new columns and tables with each macOS release. This makes their queries super complicated with multiple joins. Once you have the schema figured out, it's dead easy to build a third-party client that works better than the official one. Even search works great with a simple LIKE query but Apple re…
Source: I built a third-party desktop client for iMessage at https://texts.com Does the texts.com client solve the original problem? Does it make it easy to go back and view all those old text messages? I know the website says "from forever ago easily". But you didn't say that explicitly in your post. I assume you're being modest and not "pushing" your solution. But if it simply solves the problem, maybe you should b…
It absolutely does, scrolling up shows older messages instantly.
Also, a "jump to date" feature (like Telegram) is planned (and super easy to build.)
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#93Earlier 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…
Interesting, I love the way pinned threads are implemented, especially the big circles
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#94arguably the worst part about imessage and scrolling is that even if you do manage to scroll up and find a previous message, you are automatically scrolled down to the bottom if a new message is received in that chat (on iphone)
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#95Author here: the gist is that it's practically impossible to scroll to the beginning of an iMessage chat, and that's the only way to get to the beginning of a conversation. These old conversations take up several gigabytes of space, yet there's no good way to search them (because search for old messages is unreliable). This aspect of the iMessage user experience has remained untouched for a decade, despite everyone's…
If you can remember a term, any term, that was written in the message, you can search & jump to it directly. For my girlfriend and I, it was the bar we went to on our first date. This feature only gives you small subsets (a couple dozen, maybe) messages near the query result, but then you can just search for the last message again and get the next “page,” so to speak. Of course, remembering such a term is hard, which…
In the article they say that they have a screenshot of their first several messages and have tried to search for the text in the screenshot.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#96Can’t you use something like iMazing (I’m not a paid shill just a satisfied user and there are many similar other products from competitors) and do an offline dump from the backup?
Another vote for iMazing. It's great.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#97Wish this could be done to Facebook Messenger as well. I have some old conversations spanning over five years that would be nice to export.
FB Messenger does have data takeout, it comes in some kind of JSON format. Be prepared for some surprisingly massive file downloads though -- my chat history alone was over 50gb!
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is every video considered a large attachment?
Pulled it up on my phone just to see what they considered "large", looks like 4MB is the cutoff (nothing smaller than that shows up for me). But nearly everything I'm seeing is a video or a photo taken with my real (not phone) camera. And a random PDF I apparently sent over iMessages. However, deleting through this interface would be a pain. You select "Edit" and then each attachment is selected individually.
It seems to just show you the largest set (50? 100?). If you delete them, then you will eventually show smaller ones once you get through enough of them.
Really wish there was a "delete all" or "select all".
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is texts.com a work around for sending live imessages on a PC?
Yes, with a catch: it requires an always on Mac (which can be in the cloud) or a jailbroken iOS device. We plan to make it work without the catch. I've worked with 10+ messaging platforms so far and Apple's protocol is the most obfuscated and complicated to reverse engineer. Apple has invested millions of dollars to make the iMessage protocol super hard to reverse engineer. It's how they sell tons of iPhones after al…
I know it's a long-shot, but do you plan on documenting the protocol?
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is texts.com a work around for sending live imessages on a PC?
Yes, with a catch: it requires an always on Mac (which can be in the cloud) or a jailbroken iOS device. We plan to make it work without the catch. I've worked with 10+ messaging platforms so far and Apple's protocol is the most obfuscated and complicated to reverse engineer. Apple has invested millions of dollars to make the iMessage protocol super hard to reverse engineer. It's how they sell tons of iPhones after al…
> it requires an always on Mac (which can be in the cloud)
That’s surprising. How come?