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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

My sister was having a problem where she was taking all the iCloud storage for our family because she keeps sending videos to people but couldn't figure out a way to efficiently delete them. I had to write up a Python script (https://gist.github.com/saagarjha/615dee3c04e226b44828e910a5...) to scrape the iMessage database for large attachments, and then print out the text to messages around it so that you could search for it and jump to around that place in the chat history and then delete the files from there. It's kind of insane how hard it is to manage old messages :/ I feel like Apple didn't really prepare for Messages coming in from iCloud meaning that every device had every single message you've ever sent, and now it's really hard to get through them without reading the database manually…

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I am convinced iMessages right now is a tool to keep your storage full, push people to buy higher storage iPhone, and pay iCloud Storage backup to increase their Services Revenue.

None of the problem listed in the blog post or what you point out are new. They have been there since day one. And it is not that they neglect it either like iTunes or Aperture. They added Memoji!

Which is why I am surprised a the popularity of iMessages in US ( and France ). I think it is mostly due to SMS usage before iMessages was a thing.

Never attribute to malice…

...that's what malicious people say! ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Any_sufficiently_...

Never attribute to malice what you could attribute to a desire for profit.

"Wait, so this user story has negative business value? Let's put it in the icebox."

This is also why phones have absurdly high resolution poorly compressedt camera picture/video despite the optics not makit use of all the detail.

Did Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Review Large Attachments not work?

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".

Thanks. That makes sense. But I didn’t feel like deleting anything. Just my wife and I on the iCloud storage and there’s plenty of it at present. My photo collection that I’ve been cleaning up is a bigger offender right now than messages. Damn cats doing cute things.

I’ll have to check that actually. Maybe I can give her a high-capacity iOS device and let her sign into that, and then delete everything from there.

When I am on the iMessage dialogue screen with a contact, I can usually click on their name, then Info, and it displays all the video/photo attachments sent in that chat. I believe I can then delete them from there. Is that useful? I guess if there's a number of photos you'd like to keep, but not the large videos, it's a more complicated issue.

Maybe this is some kind of anti forensics because this is so hard?

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