It’s possible that my text messages with a colleague are more racy than the company allows. What I’m wondering is if there’s a way to delete individual photos, animated GIFs, or messages from our Messages chats? And to have it deleted on both my MacBook and my iPhone? Thanks!
There are plenty of benign reasons that you might want to delete an individual message from a chat in Messages on either your MacOS system or your iPhone or iPad. How you use these services is, well, up to you! Before we proceed, however, it’s important to note two things: If someone has the Messages app open, they’ll be able to see the message, photo, or whatever up to the point that you delete it. If they take a screenshot, you’re out of luck. You also cannot delete messages from the receiving person’s device.
Some social media services allow ephemeral messages that automatically delete after a specified amount of time, but Messages does not support this capability. As a result, the best answer might be to migrate from Messages to a different service like Facebook Messenger (which, like Messages, at least supports point-to-point encryption) or Snapchat.
Want to stick with Messages? Okay, let’s delete something!
DELETING A TEXT MESSAGE ON THE IPHONE
I’ve been chatting with my daughters and we tend to lean heavily into animated GIF images to help keep our discussion lively and amusing. No surprise, a recent discussion looks like this:
What you can’t see here is that the baby raising his hands is an animated GIF on endless loop, which is funny the first or second time you see it, but quickly becomes annoying. Solution: Let’s delete it.
Tap and hold your finger on the message in question and after a few seconds, both a shortcut menu of responses (Apple calls them “Tapbacks”) and a menu of even more options appear:
Lots of options, but no delete choice? Actually, that’s (rather confusingly) hidden in the “More…” option, which actually doesn’t offer any other choices and probably should just be called “Delete…”. But I digress. 🙂
Tap on “More…” and here’s what happens:
There’s not a lot of explanation here, but basically you can tap on the circular button to the left of one or more messages, then tap on the trashcan icon to delete them. It’s clumsy. It also turns out that the Mac version of Messages does a better job of helping you with this task…
DELETING A TEXT MESSAGE ON A MAC
Without deleting that particular animated GIF, I’m going to switch to my synchronized MacOS system. In the Messages program, it all looks quite similar. When I click and hold on the image it brings up a slightly more streamlined set of options:
Nice but… where’d all the other possibilities go?
Slight sidetrack: Wondering where the per-message timestamps are in Messages for the Mac? Tap and drag any message to the left and they all magically appear:
Okay, back on task. Instead of clicking and holding to reveal the Tapback options, right-click (that is, hold down the Control key and click) on the message instead…
Tons of options and lots that aren’t part of the iPhone or mobile experience at all! One of my favorites here is “Add to Photos Library”, which can be quite a boon if your family endlessly shares photos.
For our task, choose “Delete…“.
Click on “Delete” and then check your iPhone; it’s gone!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing tutorials for the Apple iPhone and the Mac since they were first released. Please check out my extensive iPhone help area and Mac help area for oodles of useful content.