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Webcat86

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 7, 2022
927
885
I have iCloud sync turned on for Messages, and one chat has grown to about 8gb. I want to clear this from my iCloud account to free up space, but I'm confused about the sync.

For example, on my Mac, if I look at the media files within this message thread, there are a lot of older photos displaying that aren't in the same thread on my iPad or iPhone. Also, the Mac messages has attachments that go further back in time than the ones in my other devices.

Does anyone know the reason for this? It's not a device storage issue as all of them have plenty of space left, but I wonder if it's something similar to the 'optimise storage' settings that won't download everything everywhere.

What I want to do is use one device (iPad ideally) to delete all the media files I don't want, and then iCloud to sync those changes across the other devices (for some weird and infuriating reason the Mac doesn't seem to let you select multiple files via Messages, and it tells me I've got over 3,000 files in this thread. The iPad and iPhone both allow you to select and delete multiple files at once)

Also I’ve found a folder on the Mac that has all the attachments, is this folder local-only or if I delete it will it wipe the attachments across all my devices?
 
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