What is staged-originals?

A command that finds full-quality photo and video originals kept by Apple Messages after it sent compressed copies. These originals may not appear in the Messages app or other Apple views.

Use it to list likely originals, focus on large files, rescue them to another folder, or move proven copies to Trash.

It helps recover files whose original size is hidden and which could otherwise disappear when old messages are removed.

staged-originals — Command for Claude Code by esaruoho/apple

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/esaruoho/apple

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/esaruoho/apple/staged-originals/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/esaruoho/apple/staged-originals)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/esaruoho/apple/staged-originals"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/esaruoho/apple/staged-originals/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/esaruoho/apple/staged-originals"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/esaruoho/apple/staged-originals.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 28 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.

When invoked 325 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00028	$0.00325
Opus 5.5	$0.00011	$0.00130
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00006	$0.00065
Haiku 4.5	$0.00003	$0.00032

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 9fdd7db32fbc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

staged-originals scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2mo ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

commands/staged-originals.md · 30 lines

What it actually says

Run bin/messages-staged-originals with any arguments the user gave, from the apple repo.

Send a file too big for iMessage and Messages compresses a copy, sends that, and keeps YOUR original on disk attached to the same message. attachment.total_bytes records the transmitted size, so the original is under-reported everywhere and rendered nowhere.

Report what it prints. Key points to surface:

Tiers A+B are the user's originals. The other party holds the compressed copy. These are frequently the only full-quality version in existence.
They die silently to Keep messages ▸ 1 Year or a whole-conversation delete. Always mention rescue before mentioning any deletion.
Only tier A is proven (a companion's real size equals the row's total_bytes). Tier B is likely, C is unproven, D is incoming — never auto-delete C or D.

Common invocations:

bin/messages-staged-originals                          # tiered summary
bin/messages-staged-originals --tier B --min-mb 40     # the big ones
bin/messages-staged-originals --rescue ~/Desktop/originals
bin/messages-staged-originals --delete-proven          # tier A only, to Trash

Background: wiki/concepts/messages-attachment-store.md, painpoint SYSTEM-SETTINGS-002.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2mo ago First seen · 30 lines · 28 tokens per session scan A 9fdd7db32fbc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

staged-originals is a command published in the GitHub repository esaruoho/apple (15 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 28 tokens to every session and 325 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Creative and media

staged-originals next to 6 commands from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
staged-originalsesaruoho/apple	Command	15	2d ago	MIT	A	28	Claude Code
checklistgithub/spec-kit	Command	148k	yesterday	MIT	A	13	Claude Code
clarifygithub/spec-kit	Command	148k	yesterday	MIT	A	27	Claude Code
specifygithub/spec-kit	Command	148k	yesterday	MIT	A	13	Claude Code
analyzegithub/spec-kit	Command	148k	yesterday	MIT	A	26	Claude Code
convergegithub/spec-kit	Command	148k	yesterday	MIT	A	35	Claude Code
implementgithub/spec-kit	Command	148k	yesterday	MIT	A	14	Claude Code