Title says it all. Do you have to save a pic sent via text in a separate process in order for it to actually reside on your phone?
you’ve got it …you have to save the pic as a file …
Generally yes, when you receive a text with a picture, that picture is saved somewhere in the phone’s storage memory. You could test this by restarting the phone in airplane mode, (without wifi) and pulling up the text. If it shows, then it has to be resident on your phone as there’s nowhere else it could find it.
Well, see, that’s why I’m asking. The other person in question has disabled messaging on their phone, and all of the pictures they have sent me have vanished. So I guess I do have to save them separately.
I was misled by the fact that my phone had to “download” them when they were originally sent. You would think, if you downloaded them, they’d be resident; but I guess it’s like the “download/open vs. download/save” dialogue box you get in Windows. Would be kind of nice if my phone did the same thing when downloading picture taxts.
They are on your phone in some form, otherwise you wouldn’t see them at all.
For what it is worth, I can view photos sent as iMessages on my iPhone when the phone is off the line.
Usually I can find pictures somewhere on my phone if I need to, I think. Sometimes the easiest way is to plug your phone (via USB) into your computer and navigate the file system. The folders are typically pretty straight forward, at least for every Android phone I’ve done this with. You’ll typically find pictures in a handful of different folders.
But just to clarify, is this normal text messaging we’re talking about? I only ask since you said they disappeared when the other person turned off messaging. Even if the pictures resided in the cloud, they shouldn’t be tied to another person’s account/phone. However, if we’re talking about something like snapchat/instagram/facebook etc. That’s a whole different thing.
My guess would be that, when you get them, they’re stored in some temporary cache location, and if you actively save it after that, then it’s moved to someplace more permanent. If you don’t, then eventually the cache gets cleared, and they’re gone, but you can still find them until that happens.
What kind of phone, what OS, what app for texting?
So, we are saying that these fotos, etc., are using up memory?
I get a lot of fotos on WhatsApp.
I’m not very familiar with WhatsApp other than it being owned by Facebook and during the acquisition (by FB). My initial thought was that if it’s a social media platform, then your stuff is probably in the cloud. A good test would be to see if your pictures are available if you log on at another computer or with another phone.
However, I checked their wiki page and it had this line “When a user sends a message, it first travels to the WhatsApp server where it is stored. Then the server repeatedly requests the receiver acknowledge receipt of the message. As soon as the message is acknowledged, the server drops the message; it is no longer available in database of server.”
If I’m reading it correctly, nothing is stored on their servers for more than 30 days. Everything that you can see within the app is local to your device. You can probably [generic, since I don’t know the device] pull up a settings menu, find something called ‘storage’ and it should show you what’s taking up space and see if that app is showing up near the top.
Even if it’s not, find out how much space it’s taking up. If it’s not taking up much space, the pictures are still on your phone, it’s just saving them elsewhere.
This concept is basically the foundational “cloud computing” business model. “The Cloud” never really was anything new, just a user-friendly way of referring to the concept of data storage on the Internet, hosted by various service providers of all types. It is convenient way to enable many of the online services we use, and also a great way to extract fees for storing your ever-increasing volumes of data.
Knowing where the data actually resides and who really owns it always was the biggest business driver in the cyber realm.
Thank you Joey P.
That was very helpful.
Generally, each application on your phone has some amount of local storage. The amount can be limited by the OS, or it could be limited by the app itself. It uses this so it doesn’t have to constantly re-download data, but it’s not necessarily permanently storing anything.
Some apps, like the camera app, just keep data forever, until you run out of room or explicitly delete things. Once you take a picture, it’s stored on your device permanently.
A texting app, however, probably uses the local storage as a cache: it keeps relatively recent info, but discards anything older than X days, or maybe anything further than X screens in the past. You can see this if you turn on airplane mode, then try to scroll back in time in the chats. At some point, you’ll stop seeing old chats, but if you reenable your connection, you’ll be able to go back further, since the data will get re-downloaded from the internet (assuming it’s still there).
So, yes, the pictures were downloaded when you viewed them, but whether or not they are saved is at the discretion of the app that downloaded them. And since texts and photos sent via them are often not really intended to be saved forever, it might choose to discard them to reclaim some space.
You can generally save pictures from texts to your photo library, making them permanent, but you have to do it explicitly. On iOS, you do this by long-pressing on the photo and selecting “Save”, or something like that. The process is probably pretty similar for Android.
Well it does download them, but it stores them in a temporary location, which could be deleted at any time.
To tell the phone you want to permanently keep the images, you need to move them from that temporary location into a more permanent one.
For your Windows example, it’s pretty much the exact same thing:
- Your web browser will initially download the image and store it in a temporary location, where the image could be deleted at any time. (It’s safe to do this because the browser can always just re-download the image if it’s needed again.)
- If you use the “Save” option, you’ve moving or redownloading the image from the temporary location into a permanent location which is never deleted.