How To Turn Off History In Hangouts, And Why You’d Want To

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Google is in the process of improving Hangouts, and the company has introduced many changes in the past few days. Google Hangouts will eventually fully replace Google Talk, and those on Android platform have already experienced the switch firsthand.

Hangouts can be used on Google+, Gmail and on various mobile platforms. Normally, when you start a hangout with anyone, messages are automatically saved in the history so that you can check them out at a later stage. And it’s not just text, but photos too are stored in the history.

In most cases you wouldn’t want to turn off the history in hangouts, but the problem is that there’s a 1000 photo limit for hangouts. It means that once you reach this limit, you cannot send photos anymore. At the moment, the only workaround to this problem is to either delete some photos or turn off history from your conversations.

Another reason for turning off the history on hangouts is that you might not want your history to be recorded for privacy, security, or other reasons.

Turning off Hangout history

To turn off Hangout history on your browser, open the Hangout window for the specific person and click on the options icon from the interface.

hangouts-history

This will open a small window called Options. From here, uncheck the “Hangout history” option. Note that you’ll need to disable Hangout history for each user whom you’re chatting with. Don’t forget to click on the Save button to save your changes.

If you’re using the Hangouts app on Android, then tap on the Menu button from the top right side and then tap on “Turn history off.”

history-off

The messages exchanged when the history is turned off will still be visible, but only for a short time. The history will still be recorded by the other participant.

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