User Reference: Message Viewer¶
The Message Viewer looks like every message app. But it has a couple of features for navigating long conversations.
On the left side you see your conversations. The right side has the messages. You can switch between the standard Conversation layout and a Diary layout. The Conversation layout is what you know from the Messages app. Even there are 2 additional features:
Use Jump to to jump the conversation to select and jump to a specific date.
Use the timeline for the currently shown messages to directly go to a specific date.
The Diary layout shows the messages by year/month/day. This also allows quick navigation over a long conversation.
Search¶
With the searchbox in the toolbar you can search messages, the attachments of the messages or both.
Above the messages you can search in a date range between a lower and an upper date.
Archive a chat.db folder¶
If you have made a copy of the chat.db folder it’s possible to archive this folder, too. Click on “Archive folder” in the toolbar and select the chat.db file itself. All messages and attachments will be archived.
Export attachments¶
With the Attachments button in the toolbar you can export all attachments of the selected conversation/search result/day at once.
Here I’ve done a search for heic images in a conversation:
After clicking on Attachments in the toolbar and selecting Search Result I then need to select a folder and get all heic attachments exported to the folder:
Encryption¶
You can encrypt your archives with a password. Select Encrypt from the Database menu and you will see the following window:
which is followed by:
Enter a password that has at least 8 characters. You can show the password and save the password to the Keychain. Click on Encrypt to encrypt the archive. If the password is in the Keychain you won’t notice anything when you open the archive again. In case the password is not in the Keychain you will have to enter the password:
Of course, you can decrypt your archive after encrypting it. Or you can change the encryption password:
