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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

#71

Post by fastball »

asdff wrote: post #39
esolyt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it is less that we have more SMS allotment and more that nobody wants to actually use them anymore, because they're insecure / don't work on wifi / are slow / etc.

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

#72

Post by gnicholas »

kemayo wrote: post #67
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.

So, I just tried this in Messages on Big Sur. If I search for a name, I get a list of existing-conversations that the person with that name is in at the top of the results, then the list of text results within conversations. Messages on Big Sur is (basically) the iOS Messages app ported over with Catalyst, so it has a lot of improvements compared to the highly-stale app it replaced.

Glad to hear it's been fixed in newer versions. Wish I didn't have to upgrade my entire OS to get the current version of Messages!

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

#73

Post by ska »

derefr wrote: post #31
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.

> ry 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.

I think this is how MS teams chat works too. It kind of makes sense, because it has a workflow for solving the "do you want your existing chat with Alice, or are you trying to start a new group chat with Alice & Bob" .

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

#74

Post by kemayo »

closeparen wrote: post #58

On your Mac, iMessages are stored in a SQLite database which you can inspect. https://spin.atomicobject.com/2020/05/22/search-imessage-sql...

That does work, but only for messages stored locally. If you've enabled Messages in iCloud, it won't reliably contain everything.

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

#75

Post by ska »

laurent92 wrote: post #38
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?

> They should try increasing the compression ratio until a change is noticeable, but do they care?

That fine for final/production images but it's a terrible idea for your originals, or really anything you might want to edit beyond cropping).

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

#76

Post by jodrellblank »

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 value to Apple was that if you tried to SMS someone, iPhone would check if the destination phone number was registered with Apple, and silently switch to iMessage via Apple instead.

Cynically, they intercepted millions of people's comms with hardly a murmer. Charitably they switched millions of people from country-dependent, pricey and limited SMS to internet messaging with read receipts, pictures, video, emoji, audio recordings without any hassle of logging in, changing apps, choosing clients, etc.

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

#77

Post by novok »

neal_jones wrote: post #52

I'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.

You'd be surprised how few engineers work on apple projects relative to their size, and how apple underpays compared to other big tech companies like FB or Google unless your working on the current hot project.

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

#78

Post by cglong »

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.

One underrated feature of iMessage is graceful degradation. If I'm unable to send/receive data for whatever reason, my message (and their replies) automatically fall back to SMS. There's been a few occasions where this was my only way of communicating important information, so I'm grateful for it.

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

#79

Post by willseth »

The comparison to Photos in TFA is apt. Apple could copy the most relevant subset of features, in particular the Years/Months/Days/All navigation views, and it would dramatically improve the utility of iMessage for old messages. Improving the abysmal search result quality is probably more important, though.

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

#80

Post by PhantomGremlin »

nodamage wrote: post #32

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/

That's a good hint.

It does have some important limitations.

1) I do clean installs when I update macOS, so the Library folder is created new each time. Which means that archived messages only go back to that point. (I browsed via Terminal and used the command line 'open' command to view them.)

I do retain old ~/Library folders and it's possible to use the same technique in finding messages there.

2) But, and here's the big limitation: at a quick glance, they're simply individual messages, by date. There's no way to follow entire threads. I suppose it would be possible to write your own program to organize these. But the point of the article is that Apple should make it easy. Your method isn't easy.

Edit: response to sibling comment. I'm still on Catalina and the above works. I have no idea about Big Sur.

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