While catching up on old episodes of Mac Geek Gab, I was drawn to share some insight about deleting attachments to text messages. I was surprised to discover that I haven’t written about this important topic and a space-saving process with which I’ve helped many clients before.

When you send or receive pictures and videos via text message, these items take up space on your iPhone and/or in iCloud. Unless you find value in seeing shared media in the context of a conversation, this storage may be precious to conserve and you might be wise to keep these items in your Photos Library instead.

The philosophy here is that if you use iCloud Photos and instruct iCloud to optimize your library on your iPhone, these attachments will take up less space on your phone if you move them to your library compared to leaving them in a message. There are a couple approaches to locating such attachments to save and/or delete.

Find Attachments in a Conversation

If you want to save shared media in a text message, open a given conversation thread. You can tap the download button () that appears to the right of a received attachment, but downloading a series of items this way can be tedious.

Instead, tap the contact at the top of the screen, scroll down to Photos, and tap See All. From this view, you can tap Select and choose one or more items. Tap Save to keep them in your Photos Library. Tap Delete to delete them from the conversation thread.

If you were the sender, then you probably already have an item in your library and don’t need to keep it in Messages.

View a List in Settings

If you visit Settings > General > iPhone Storage, you may see a recommendation to Review Large Attachments. This appears on devices where attachments are taking up a significant amount of space.

If this invitation doesn’t appear, you can tap Messages in the list below and then choose a type of document like Photos or Videos for a list of those items in descending order by size. (Top Conversations shows storage used by specific threads and links back to them in Messages where you can browse attachments as described earlier.)

When viewing this list, there’s no way to know whether you sent or received an attachment. Nonetheless, you can interact with this list like any other: swipe left to Delete one item or tap Edit, multi-select, and tap the Trash to delete a group.

How often do you scroll through a chat to find a specific shared photo purely to appreciate it in that moment? If the answer is rarely or never, and you exchange a lot of media, I strongly encourage you to make use of this tutorial.