Please help - photos in iPad text messages won't show on iMac or MBA

[misfits1]

Hello, I'm hoping someone here can help me - I've talked to 3 Apple support reps and someone at the Genius Bar. Now it's been escalated but I haven't heard any update yet. I have old text messages on my iPad - sentimental conversations with my mom, who died a few years ago, so these are very important to me. There are photos in the text messages - these photos are also in my iCloud library. I have an iMac 24 and just purchased a new MBA. I backed up both these devices from iCloud and everything transferred over except these older text messages - the text in the messages are there but where the photos should be there is just a grey outline of each photo. (Note - this is only on the on these old text messages; in the more recent texts photos are there). There is no option to "download" the images. If I right click on the image the options are: Tapback, Delete or Show Times. I am using the same Apple ID on all devices; I have all three update to date on software and two factor authentication is turned on. I've have Bluetooth turned on with all 3 and tried in the iMessage app to select File/Import from iPad but this is greyed out on both of the Macs - I think this is because these devices will connect to the iPad for a second or two and then automatically disconnect, despite me entering the code that shows up on the screen to approve it. I have physically connected the iPad to the computers with a USB C and backed up from the iPad but the pictures still don't show up. All devices have been backed up again to iCloud today. I don't know what else to do. Note - I don't have an iPhone to see if they would show up there (I'll be getting the 14 in Sept. but right now I have an android). I've spent hours researching online and it seems like this has been a problem for a lot of other people but I haven't been able to find any resolution. Can anyone please suggest a fix? Thank you

 

[misfits1]

Hello, just an update in case anyone ever runs into this same issue - I had to turn off iCloud for Messages on the device that had the most text messages (in this case, my iPad) -then turn off Wifi, turn off the device and restart. Once restarted I turned on iCloud and Wifi - then on my two other devices that were the ones missing the texts I logged out of iCloud messages, turned off device, restarted, signed back into iCloud and clicked "sync" (on iMac and MBA). It took about 10-15 mins but then the texts had images; one thing to note, on the iMac the images loaded themselves; on the MBA I had a new option "download image", which I had to do for every photo, but now they are there; it's just weird that the iMac downloaded the images on its own.

I also want to let people know the app "AnyTrans" did not work for me - even though I have 300+gb storage available on my both my iMac and MBA as soon as I tried to upload text messages it would get stuck and I got an error message "your system has run out of application memory". The app was free to download and I would have happily paid for the membership if it had worked but unfortunately it didn't solve my issue.

I also tried to "Import from iPad" through iMessage but this option was greyed out on both my MBA and iMac; I also backed up directly from my iPad via USB C but it didn't restore my messages.

In the end iCloud came through but it's a very specific order of steps that needs to be undertaken to force the other devices to start the process of downloading from iCloud - another odd thing is it restore texts I have long since erased, such as spam - it brought back EVERYTHING from the past 5 years.