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How to Delete All iPhone iMessage Attachments at Once

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If you’re running out of the storage space on your iPhone, an easy way to free up space is by deleting iMessage attachments. Here’s how to delete all iPhone iMessage attachments the easy way.

There are a lot of ways you can free up space on your iPhone, including some methods that you may not even know about, like clearing the Recently Deleted folder in Photos and even uninstalling and re-installing apps to clear out the app cache and data.

However, one method that many users may not even think about is getting rid of iMessage attachments.

When you send and receive text messages on your iPhone that include photos, audio files, etc., they’re stored on your iPhone until you manually delete them. In fact, it’s one thing that takes up space in the mysterious “Other” category that you probably know all too well.

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For example, if you take a photo on your iPhone and then send it to someone through iMessage, there are now two copies of that photo stored on your iPhone: one in the Photos app and one in the Messages app.

Read: How to Fix iMessage Syncing Issues

By regularly clearing out your iMessage attachments, you’ll be able to free up space on your iPhone and get back some free storage space that had been missing previously.

To easily do this, here’s how to delete all of your iPhone iMessage attachments at once.

Deleting All iPhone iMessage Attachments

When you receive a text message with a photo attached or whenever you send a photo in a text message, those photos get stored in the Messages app on your iPhone, even if there’s already a copy of it in the Photos app. This can quickly take up more and more space on your iPhone, but here’s how to delete these attachments.

Read: How to Back Up iPhone Text Messages

The process is a bit complicated at first, but it’s fairly easy to do, and once you do it for the first time, it’ll be really easy after that.

  • The first thing you’ll do is open up the Messages app and select a conversation.
  • From there, tap on Details in the top-right corner.

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  • Scroll down a bit and you’ll see a mosaic layout of all the photos that you’ve ever sent or received in that particular message conversation with that person.
  • To delete these photos and other attachments, simply tap and hold on a photo and then select More from the pop-up menu.

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  • Go through the photos and tap to select every photo that you want deleted. A checkmark will appear in the corner of every photo that you have selected. Unfortunately, you can’t select all of them at once.
  • Once you have all of the photos selected that you want deleted, simply just tap on the trash can icon in the bottom-right corner and then confirm the action when the pop-up appears.

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Automatically Delete iMessage Attachments

If you’d rather not go through the above process every once in a while to free up space, you can have your iPhone automatically delete old messages after a certain period of time, and this includes photos that you’ve sent or received.

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To do this, navigate to Settings > Messages > Keep Messages and select an option for how long you want messages kept for before they’re deleted. You can choose between 30 Days, 1 Year, or Forever.

This will delete any text message (not just attachments) that go past the desired timeframe that you specify. It’s not the most ideal setting to enable, as you may need to refer back to previous text messages from the past, but it’s perhaps the best way to automatically free up space on your iPhone without having to do anything.

6 Comments

6 Comments

  1. mackabieviper42

    11/24/2015 at 8:26 am

    IOS 9.1 really sucks now it doesn’t transfer my photos to my iPod off my iPhone 5s been having problems with it now. What is next with this iOS 9.1 besides crashing and freezing on app on photo album freezing of the screen where I can not move to another row of apps draining of battery to fast I could go on and on. When I had my Samsung Galaxy S3 or HTC ONE had this many updates like Apple did on iPhone 5 and 6 not even my old iPhone 4 32 GB had this much problems with IOS’s

    • p

      03/15/2016 at 9:27 am

      congrats, you’re too stupid to use an iphone.

  2. Deanskorando

    11/29/2015 at 8:12 am

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  3. Kevin

    05/03/2017 at 3:55 am

    Garbage title. Suggested edit: ‘How to delete all iPhone iMessage attachments one by one.’

    • Simeon Gad

      02/04/2018 at 12:16 am

      Exactly. Obviously we already know the one by one method. :/

  4. Alex

    07/20/2017 at 7:31 pm

    I agree With Kevin, Lame title, thanks a lot for wasting my time.

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