Documents & Data cleanup - how can I downsize iMessage archive?

Willing to kill for an answer to this question!

 

Yes, its actually pretty easy. You can delete just the single message with the photo, since it make the photo and the text that came along with it two separate items. Go into the conversation that has the picture, and tap and hold the picture for a few second. You'll get a menu that pops up, and one of the choices is MORE. Click more, and the conversation will move to the right, and there will be little check mark bubbles to the left of each individual message. Make sure the bubble is checked next to the picture(s) you want to delete, and click the Trash Can icon in the bottom left. Just make sure you don't click the Delete All button at the top left, or it'll wipe out the whole thread.

See the attached screenshot.

Hope this helps!

*EDIT* - Sorry. If you were looking for a way that would delete all the pictures in one swoop, then no, what I mentioned won't work. But if you are ok with deleting all the pics from each thread at one time, this will.

 

Gotcha. Ok. Sorry my suggestion didn't help. Good luck!

 

Here is a thread that may lead to an answer. Read through it.

Link

Regards, Dave

 

Great stuff; thank you Dave!

 

You can reduce the size of your backed up messages by deleting them individually from the messages app. Mine was taken up by a bunch of memes and stuff that my friends send around in texts....they add up after a while.

 

I felt I had saved most of the important pictures at the time of delivery, so I used the method in that link to scrub my backup clean. I got 3.9gb back. It would be a major pain to go through one by one.

Regards, Dave

 

Not ideal, but really easy and it does exactly what you're after.

 

Backup the photos on your iOS device to your computer, then delete all the old/unnecessary photos from your device in the photos app. This will then remove the photo from all the other places it was used on the device, such as albums, photo streams, and message conversations, thus reducing the "other" space used on the device.

 

Removing a photo or video from the camera roll does remove it from albums as well - but since albums are just links, you can have the same video in a hundred albums, and it won't take any more space than if it wasn't in any album at all.

On the other hand, removing a photo from the camera roll will NOT remove anything from the Messages app or photo streams.