After a full year of use and thousands of chats, it’s a good idea to delete our entire ChatGPT history. Deleting our conversations and stored images, and clearing out our chats so we can start fresh, is great not only for ChatGPT’s performance but also because it gives us that “blank page” feeling, like starting something brand new. Let’s see how we can do it with just a couple of taps.
A clean history to work in an orderly way
When we use ChatGPT every day, conversations pile up quickly and end up forming a huge archive: project ideas, personal questions, searches on any topic, image generation… and that sidebar list keeps growing and growing.
Cleaning it up from time to time, or once a year, is especially important if our usage is very high. By leaving the sidebar—where the list of chats appears—empty, it becomes easier to find important conversations more quickly, and at the same time we reduce the trail of personal information that sometimes slips into the odd one-off query. On top of that, everything loads faster and there’s an overall feeling of order and cleanliness.
When we delete chats, the conversations disappear from the history instantly, and their permanent deletion is scheduled within a maximum of 30 days.
How to delete all of our ChatGPT history on iPhone, iPad, and Mac
Whether from the ChatGPT website or the app, the steps are very simple:
- We open ChatGPT in the browser and sign in with our account.
- We tap Settings from the user menu, located in the lower-left corner.
- We go to Data Controls and look for the Delete all chats option.
- We tap the button and confirm.
The chat list will be completely empty and the history will disappear from our account.
Let’s remember that the deletion is global, and therefore any chats we have inside projects (what projects are and how to use them) will also disappear.
If we really want to reset our ChatGPT account completely, we can also review its memory. Memory is the space where ChatGPT saves certain details we ask it to remember—“reminders” for future conversations—such as our tone preferences, whether we want it to use emojis, bold text, lists… or not, and so on. We can delete all of this by going to Settings > Personalization > Manage Memory. Combining both, deleting the history and clearing Memory, gives us a full reset of our account.
Once we leave the history empty, ChatGPT feels much lighter in day-to-day use. The sidebar is clear again and we start from scratch with a sense of order, ready for new ideas and interesting projects.
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