Where apps hide your files

Messages attachments on disk

Updated 2026-07-31 · 4 min read

Every photo ever sent to you in iMessage may be sitting on your disk. Finding them is the trick.

The location

~/Library/Messages/Attachments/

Inside, a two-level hash structure (ab/cd/…) with each attachment in its own folder under a UUID. The chat database itself is ~/Library/Messages/chat.db.

Being inside ~/Library, none of it appears in Spotlight results.

Seeing what is in there

du -sh ~/Library/Messages/Attachments
find ~/Library/Messages/Attachments -type f \( -iname "*.jpg" -o -iname "*.heic" -o -iname "*.mov" \) | wc -l

Years of conversations routinely hold tens of gigabytes here.

Getting a specific attachment out

From Messages itself is cleanest: open the conversation → info button (ⓘ) → Photos / Documents tabs → right-click → Save. That copies it somewhere sensible without touching the store.

Directly from disk works too — the files are ordinary JPEG/HEIC/MOV — but treat the folder as read-only. Copy out; never reorganise in place.

Reclaiming the space

Messages → Settings → General → Keep messages — switching from Forever to one year deletes older messages *and their attachments*, everywhere iCloud syncs. Understand that before flipping it.

More surgical: System Settings → General → Storage → Messages lists large attachments with delete buttons.

Finding them by name

Attachments keep their original filenames (IMG_2041.HEIC, invoice.pdf), so a search tool that indexes ~/Library finds a document someone texted you the same as any other file — which is frequently where "I know I have it somewhere" files turn out to be.

Common questions

Where are iMessage photos stored on a Mac?

~/Library/Messages/Attachments, in hashed subfolders. The conversation database is chat.db in the same Library folder.

Does deleting a conversation delete its attachments?

Yes, and with Messages in iCloud the deletion syncs to your other devices.