How to Stop IMessage From Flooding Your IPhone and ICloud
On my Apple devices, there are over 55,000 items in the Messages app. This includes texts, voice notes, photos, videos, GIFs, and other attachments sent and received across multiple devices. Over time, Messages threatens to become the second largest hog on my precious storage space, just behind Photos. Fortunately, I took action in time and began to get rid of the junk I no longer needed. I told myself that I don’t need to be an iMessage archivist and I might as well start deleting some messages to free up space. Here’s how you can get rid of unnecessary items from iMessage to free up space on your iPhone, iPad, Mac and iCloud.
How to Quickly Free up iMessage Storage Space on Your iPhone or iPad
To see how much space iMessage takes up on your iPhone, go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Messages . If you haven’t deleted unwanted attachments for a long time, you may have more than 50GB of iMessage attachments.
If you’re ready to delete entire chats, you can click “Top Conversations” and click the “Edit” button in the top right corner. Select all the chats you want to delete and click the Trash icon in the top right corner of the page. This is the fastest way to free up a lot of space, but it can mess up your iMessage group chats. If you use this method, you may have to get invited to these groups again.
For a more targeted removal of iMessage attachments, go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Messages again. Here, you can view each attachment type—photos, videos, GIFs, and stickers, among others—one by one. Tap any of these categories and click the Edit button in the top right corner. Then select all unnecessary attachments and click the Trash icon in the top right corner to free up space.
How to Stop iMessage from Taking Up Space on Your iPhone
If you’re not careful, you’ll end up accumulating more junk in your iMessage again, so let’s take some preventative measures. On iPhone, go to Settings > Apps > Messages and under Message History, tap Save Messages . You can change this value from “Forever” to 30 days or 1 year . This will automatically delete all iMessage texts and attachments older than the time you select. Likewise, in the Audio Messages section on the same page, tap Expire and select After 2 Minutes to automatically delete unwanted voice memos.
Return to the Messages settings page and scroll down the page. Here, you can enable Low Quality Image Mode to reduce the size of the images you send and receive in iMessage. This makes photos look a little blurry and sometimes makes it hard to see text in screenshots, but if you’re really short on storage space, this will help.
You can also prevent SMS messages from being automatically forwarded to other Apple devices. To do this, go to Settings > Apps > Messages, SMS forwarding and turn it off for all devices where you don’t want to see these messages. Note that this will not prevent iMessage chats from appearing on these devices.
Bulk delete large iMessage attachments on your Mac
Just like on your phone, you can also quickly free up space on your Mac by deleting large attachments from the Messages app. On a Mac, go to System Preferences > General > Storage and click the i button next to Messages . This will show all the large attachments hidden in your Messages app. If you manually access each chat, these attachments are difficult to track. Instead, click on any attachment here, press Command-A to select them all, and click the Remove button to get rid of them.
How to reduce iMessage’s impact on iCloud storage space
iCloud Space is also an important part of this conversation. If you find that iMessage is taking up more iCloud storage than you can afford, on your iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > [YOUR NAME] > iCloud and tap Messages . Now turn off Use on this iPhone . This will delete your text messages from iCloud backups and free up space. However, it will also stop syncing SMS messages on Apple devices, so keep that in mind. On your Mac, this option is under System Preferences > [YOUR NAME] > iCloud > Messages .
For a more step-by-step approach on iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > [YOUR NAME] > iCloud > Messages > Manage Storage . Tap “Top Conversations” and delete unnecessary chats in iCloud. You can always go back to the previous page and click Turn off and remove from iCloud to completely remove messages from iCloud.