[dawnerd]

Same with photos. You can enable the option to offload but there’s no way to control how much is used locally. I don’t know why messages does that either. Also no easy way to remove the hundreds of thousands of photos in messages across all chats.

[mh-]

And for people like me who are content to pay for the iCloud storage in order to not delete them - there's no way to say "keep everything. but not locally, because that's silly."