[smaccona]

I use an iPhone, and my Messages app is using 72GB at the moment (and it would be a lot more if I hadn’t lost all my history about 5 years ago). The issue is that extended family members send a lot of media (mostly family photos / videos) via group messages, and although there is a way to expire messages older than a certain age, there isn’t a way to only expire media from messages older than a certain date and/or automatically bulk export media from messages (you can do it manually, but we’re talking a LOT of media here). I guess I just haven’t been disciplined enough or had enough time to export media I wanted to keep and then remove it from Messages as time went on.

In any case this feature wouldn’t benefit me, because I don’t think any of my extended family would want to use it.

[radicality]

I wish more people would send things via `Share iCloud link` instead of just sending media directly. I usually try to do that. I finally fee like this feature is pretty good at photo sharing, works well and bug free. The way it works is you select what media you want to share over iMessage (even >1k works succesfuly for me), and Apple then gives you link which when a recipient visits, they can directly add to their iCloud, seems like it's a backend-to-backend copy, since even very large transfers worked quickly like this for me. And the benefit is that it doesn't use up iMessage space (just iCloud photos space).