When you go to search Messages on your Apple device, do you tend to come up empty? The search function has grown greatly in OS 26 but it can still be finicky. Plus, it’s important to know where to start.
It never occurred to me that users may have different approaches to search. However, a recent client demonstrated just that. To search messages for a photo shared by a particular contact, she first tapped the button to compose a new message and identified the person as the recipient.
From there, she was able to (tediously) scroll back to the attachment in the chronology but wasn’t able to download it. When I arrived, I revealed a more direct way to locate the item.
One of my first posts after returning from my cross-country bike trip was about cleaning up Messages Attachments. These media — photos, videos, and other files you’ve sent or received via text message — tend to take up quite a lot of space on our devices and, for many folks, in iCloud, too. So, it’s helpful to know how to review and manage them.
Client Notes
Last week, I helped Debbie recover an important photo and document sent by a contact in Messages, coaching her in how to locate such items easily within a conversation. I also completed an email migration for three business users who are now spending 10x less on email hosting.
Also, I gave Karen the confidence to move forward with her Mac with ease after a recent restore of her data and assessed Lee’s storage in preparation for his migration to a new Mac.
Search Messages
To search Messages on iPhone and iPad, the best place to start is the Search field in the app. In iOS 18 and earlier, this is above the first conversation in the list. To jump to the top, tap the Status Bar at the top of the screen, above the conversation list. In iOS 26 and later, Search floats above the list near the bottom of the screen.
The first thing you’ll see is recently shared items, including collaborative notes, links, photos, locations, and documents. If you’re looking for one of these, you may have already found it. Or, tap See All for a longer list of shared items in that category. Each will show the profile icon for the person who shared it.
Otherwise, using the search field, you can seek out conversations with one or more specific individuals as well as text that has appeared in messages you have sent or received. The search drop-down will show these various choices for you to select and/or add to your query. Sometimes, you can bundle multiple search tokens to more precisely target your desired result.
Find a Photo, Document, or Link
Locating media attached to a message may be more difficult, but Apple has introduced some improvements to ease your struggle. Start to search messages, or browse your list, and open an existing conversation. Then, tap the person or group at the top.
In OS 26, this presents an organized pane of various types of information and attachments: Info, Backgrounds, Photos [and Videos], Links, Documents. Select the section that contains the item you seek and see how easy it is to find.
iOS can be inconsistent at showing media, claiming that messages need to be indexed first. If you don’t end up locating something, consider that it might be more readily accessible on another device — like your Mac. If your messages are in sync via iCloud, try your same search on the Mac. Maybe you’ll be lucky and find that the item already downloaded there.
Clean House
There are a couple layers of cleaning and consolidation that may be useful in Messages. When searching for a contact who has changed numbers over time, it may benefit you to merge these into the same contact record.
If you do this, your messages with their multiple identities should merge into a single conversation. Then, rather than searching for disparate interactions, it may be easier to locate an attachment in the unified listing.
Also, notably, there were some bugs in prior versions of macOS that prevented easily multi-selecting Messages attachments and deleting them en masse. This has been resolved in macOS 26.
So, I recommend using a Mac to do this cleanup because multi-selection with Shift and/or Command is easier to accomplish. (On mobile, you must manually tap each item to select it, which can be tedious.)
After you select one or more items, right-click or Control+click on one of them and select Delete. Or, obviously, you can use the same menu to Quick Look, Save, Copy, or Share the selected item(s).
How do you search messages and what do you find? Share your experiences in the comments so we can learn from you as well.
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