Most of my iCloud space seems to be taken up with years worth of text messages, and I’m heavily questioning if that should continue to be the case. I’d love to download and save the oldest ones so I can sort through them at my leisure, so I’d like to save them in a format that’s easy to skim, as opposed to just scrolling back in Messages conversations over possibly years.
I’ve looked up this topic in Google, but I’m still having trouble figuring out what’s the best route, so I have some questions:
Since my entire purpose with this is to free space on iCloud, is there an easy way to delete, say, all messages older than two years, while keeping all the others intact? I mean one that doesn’t involve madly scrolling back and selecting individual messages with radio buttons.
I see from Google that you can back up your iPhone on a desktop, which I have, with or without iTunes. Is there a native way to look at the messages in this archive? If not, what’s the best way to do so? I don’t like downloading random apps without at least some idea of what they are and if they’re trustworthy.
To confirm, however I do this will keep photos sent through the messages I archive, right?
I’m guessing you only have the free 5GB iCloud tier? If that’s the case, and since freeing up that iCloud space is what’s most important to you, maybe you should just stop backing up Messages to iCloud and make local back ups instead.
There really isn’t a native way to offload and read old messages (unless you have a Mac and use the macOS Messages app). Some third party apps that can do that are iMazing and PhoneView. They can offload the messages so that they are readable from inside the respective app. I think they can can also be exported to PDF files, I guess that’s nice for archive purposes but you’ll still be doing a lot of scrolling. I’ve barely used these apps, but I would guess there is a function to also transfer the full photos and videos sent through Messages, as opposed to just getting the thumbnails in the conversation window. If they don’t, you can manually save photos and videos in Messages to your iPhone photo library. Both apps have free trials, though, so you can see which works best for you.
You can set up Messages to keep messages for the last 30 days, the last year, or forever. To change this setting, go to Settings > Messages > Keep Messages. If you do change it, make sure to make a local back up first.