This week a reader writes, “Recently I was notified about needing more storage. Looking at my concentration of 50 gigabytes, about 28 GB is messaging and 12 gb is photos. Do I need to delete from my phone and Mac? Best way to reduce?"

The best settings are what works for you.

If you’ve got that one friend who likes to send you daily memes or inspirational quotes or pictures of their pets, you’ll be surprised at the size some of those attachments.

If you didn’t know, all those photos you get in your texts are taking up space in your iCloud storage if you choose to sync your messages to the cloud.

You get a small amount (5 GB) of free storage with each Apple ID. If you want more storage, you’ll have to pay. I personally pay Apple $2.99 per month for 200 GB.

You can keep upping your iCloud storage amount (for more money), or you will get to the point where you need to cull out what you consider not to be “cloud worthy.”

Not everyone has their messages set to sync to the cloud. You certainly don’t need to have every text and attachment on all your devices.

It is not the text that takes up the space, it is the attachments (usually photos).

My first suggestion is to take some time and go through the message threads on your phone and delete any message threads you don’t need.

You can swipe a thread from right to left and you’ll see a red trash icon. Let go and the thread will disappear.

If you want to see what threads are taking up the most space, you can open your iPhone’s settings, then touch on your name at the top of the settings page and then touch iCloud, where you’ll see an overview of what’s stored in your iCloud.

To use myself as an example, I have 14.2 GB in Messages saved on my iCloud.

If you enter the “Messages In iCloud” screen, you’ll see a “Manage Storage” option. Select it and you’ll get a list of your threads, sorted by the size of each message thread.

In my account, my thread with my wife takes up 2.53 GB and my thread with my mom takes 2.52 GB. You can touch each entry and you’ll be taken to the thread.

When you delete threads or attachments on the phone, they’ll be deleted from your iCloud storage as well.

If you have your Mac to sync Messages to iCloud, anything you delete on the phone or Mac will be deleted from the other locations. Note, the threads don’t disappear from your other devices instantly. It may take a few hours or even overnight for everything to sync up.

If you’d like to see the attachments in a specific message thread, you can open a message thread, touch the contact’s icon at the top of the thread and you’ll see an information screen that includes a section for photos. In the photos section, you can touch See All to see all the photos you and the other person(s) have shared in the thread. Those photos are saved on your phone and synced to your iCloud storage if you have messages set to sync.

If you hold your finger on a photo you get the choice to save or delete it.

Saving the picture will put it in your camera roll.

Android users can take similar measures if they have their messages synced to the Google cloud.

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