iMessage history navigation - there has to be a faster way.....

[bscheffel]

I am trying to view an old iMessage from January 2016 on my Mac. The thread is with my partner so we message alot daily. The first 9 months of history were accessible relatively quickly but now (I'm at August 2018 after three days of scrolling backwards) I get the beach ball for 14 minutes and then it shows 2-4 more days of past conversation. At this rate it will take me a week or so to get back to January 2016. I have tried searching iMessage but haven't found the exact message I'm looking for. I have tried to open the iChat.db in SQL lite but have little patience for trying to figure out the queries I need and I'd like to have the message displayed in the iMessage UI (it's a sentimental message i'm trying to print) and not a database record format.
Either the database design of iMessage is just garbage or how the iMessage app interacts with the db is garbage.

 

[mk313]

I had the same issue. The only thing I could come up with is to search for a term you remember using around the timeframe you are looking for. That takes you to the general vicinity and allows you to start the scrolling from that point. Not ideal but if you can remember something that fits the criteria, it does save you a lot of time.

 

[BigBlur]

I had the same issue. The only thing I could come up with is to search for a term you remember using around the timeframe you are looking for. That takes you to the general vicinity and allows you to start the scrolling from that point. Not ideal but if you can remember something that fits the criteria, it does save you a lot of time.

This...but you don't even need to think of a search term you might have used around that timeframe if you can't remember. To go back to a specific timeframe, I just search for a common word, such as "the" or "a". It shows every occurrence in the search results (or words containing "a"), ordered by date, and is easily scrollable. I was able to quickly go back to a conversation from February 2018 within less than a minute, which is the beginning of my messages.

 

[bscheffel]

This...but you don't even need to think of a search term you might have used around that timeframe if you can't remember. To go back to a specific timeframe, I just search for a common word, such as "the" or "a". It shows every occurrence in the search results (or words containing "a"), ordered by date, and is easily scrollable. I was able to quickly go back to conversation from February 2018 in less than a minute, which is the beginning of my messages.

I'm going to give this a try, won't lie, I am a little anxious in exiting the iMessage thread after 3 days of scrolling and waiting, scrolling and waiting Ill let you know how it goes.

This...but you don't even need to think of a search term you might have used around that timeframe if you can't remember. To go back to a specific timeframe, I just search for a common word, such as "the" or "a". It shows every occurrence in the search results (or words containing "a"), ordered by date, and is easily scrollable. I was able to quickly go back to a conversation from February 2018 within less than a minute, which is the beginning of my messages.

OMG - thank you both - it WORKED! I can't believe I wasted three days but glad I saved another week of scrolling.

 

[newadventure]

The app Chatology used to be stellar for this but Apple changed the APIs or message database structure or whatever and they had to discontinue the app

 

[dizmonk]

I had the same issue. The only thing I could come up with is to search for a term you remember using around the timeframe you are looking for. That takes you to the general vicinity and allows you to start the scrolling from that point. Not ideal but if you can remember something that fits the criteria, it does save you a lot of time.

Okay, I've got a similar but more complex problem using Imessages. I'm trying to find ALL videos sent to me by my teenager. I know at the time she sent it, I usually clicked the save icon if I thought I wanted to keep it. Those videos show up in Photos. However, I KNOW there were videos I didn't initially save but still exist in the original message.

As the original poster said, scrolling through dozens of daily messages going back years will take forever... Does anyone have any suggestions? thanks.

 

[Tdude96]

Okay, I've got a similar but more complex problem using Imessages. I'm trying to find ALL videos sent to me by my teenager. I know at the time she sent it, I usually clicked the save icon if I thought I wanted to keep it. Those videos show up in Photos. However, I KNOW there were videos I didn't initially save but still exist in the original message.

As the original poster said, scrolling through dozens of daily messages going back years will take forever... Does anyone have any suggestions? thanks.

I had some luck finding old videos by searching by file format (mov) in Messages. Scroll until you get to Photos, click See All, and everything listed under that is video. Still might involve a lot of scrolling if it's older and people send you a lot of videos, but you see the sender's identity in the upper right of each thumbnail, so that helps a bit.

Searching mp4 also gave me some video results - possibly from android users.