How to Keep iMessage From Filling Up Your iPhone and iCloud

My Apple devices have over 55,000 items in the Messages app. This includes texts, voice notes, photos, videos, gifs, and other attachments sent and received on multiple devices. Over time, Messages has threatened to become the second-largest occupier of my precious storage space, right after Photos. Fortunately, I took action at the right time to start getting rid of the cruft I don't need. I told myself that I don't need to be an iMessage archivist and I can begin letting go of some messages to free up some 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

Credit: Pranay Parab

To review how much space iMessage is taking up on your iPhone, go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Messages. If you haven’t cleared up unnecessary attachments in a long time, you could be staring at more than 50GB of iMessage attachments.

If you are ready to delete entire chats, you can tap Top Conversations and hit the Edit button in the top-right corner. Select all the chats you want to delete and hit 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 tends to mess with your iMessage group chats. You may have to get yourself invited to those groups again if you use this method.

For a more focused approach to deleting iMessage attachments, once again go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Messages. Here, you can review each type of attachment—photos, videos, GIFs and stickers, and Other—one by one. Tap any of these categories and hit the Edit button in the top-right corner. Then, select all the attachments you don’t need and hit the Trash icon in the top-right corner to free up space.

How to stop iMessage from filling up space on your iPhone

Credit: Pranay Parab

If you’re not careful, you’ll end up just accumulating more junk in iMessage again, so let’s take some preventive measures. On your iPhone, go to Settings > Apps > Messages, and under Message History, tap Keep Messages. You can change this from Forever to 30 Days or 1 Year. This will automatically delete all iMessage texts and attachments older than the time you selected. Similarly, under Audio Messages on the same page, tap Expire and select After 2 Minutes to automatically clear unwanted voice notes.

Return to the Messages settings page and scroll to the bottom. Here, you can enable Low-Quality Image Mode to reduce the size of images you send and receive on iMessage. This makes photos look a little blurry and sometimes makes it hard to see the text in screenshots, but if you’re really hurting for storage space, it’ll help.

You can also stop your SMS messages from being forwarded automatically to your other Apple devices. To do this, go to Settings > Apps > Messages, SMS Forwarding and disable it for all the devices that you don't need to see those messages on. Note that this will not stop iMessage chats from appearing on those devices.

Bulk delete large iMessage attachments on your Mac

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Like on your phone, you can also quickly free up storage space on your Mac by deleting large attachments from the Messages app. On your Mac, go to System Settings > General > Storage and click the i button next to Messages. This will reveal all the large attachments hiding within your Messages app. If you go to each chat manually, these attachments are hard to track down. Instead, click any attachment here, press Command-A to select all of them, and hit the Delete button to get rid of them.

How to reduce iMessage’s impact on your iCloud storage space

Credit: Pranay Parab

iCloud space is also an important part of this conversation. If you find that iMessage is taking up more iCloud space than you can afford to spare, on your iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > [YOUR NAME] > iCloud and tap Messages. Now disable Use on this iPhone. This will remove your text messages from your iCloud backups and free up space. However, it’ll also stop syncing SMS messages across Apple devices, so be aware of that. On your Mac, this option is under System Settings > [YOUR NAME] > iCloud > Messages.

For a more piecemeal approach, on your iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > [YOUR NAME] > iCloud > Messages > Manage Storage. Tap Top Conversations and remove the chats you don’t want on iCloud. You can always still return to the previous page and tap Turn Off and Delete from iCloud to remove Messages from iCloud entirely.

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