It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
1–10 of 276 posts
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#2Author 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 chats growing longer. Searching for particular iMessages sucks because the results miss the broader context of the conversation (a single message is not useful when you want to reread a conversation).
(Also just noting, as the post author I created a title better-suited to HN's 80 character limit.)
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#3Author 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…
Have you tried emailing Craig Federighi about this? I emailed him a bunch of times about several things and he's a really nice and responsive person.
If you do, tell us about it here on HN.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#4Yeah, can second this.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#5Author 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…
Have you tried emailing Craig Federighi about this? I emailed him a bunch of times about several things and he's a really nice and responsive person. If you do, tell us about it here on HN.
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.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#6I've found the only way to read super old imessages is to go to the sqlite db they're stored in on a mac and look directly in the db...
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#7Can’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?
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#8I 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.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#9I've found the only way to read super old imessages is to go to the sqlite db they're stored in on a mac and look directly in the db...
Where’s that? I’ll totally play with that if I can !
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#10I've found the only way to read super old imessages is to go to the sqlite db they're stored in on a mac and look directly in the db...
If I have an idea of what I’m looking for, I just use search. It was useless until a few years ago but has gotten dramatically better recently.
The scroll-load-scroll-load cycle does suck, though.