You can search the Messages app for photos, links, documents, locations, collaborations and text within a conversation. The pinned conversation's contact photo will now appear above all the other messages.Īlso, make sure you take advantage of the search feature, as well. All you need to do is press down on a conversation and then select Pin. You can also pin a conversation to the top of the Message page. We have a roundup of 10 tips that take you beyond the basics of sending and receiving messages.įor example, you can mute individual conversations with a left swipe across the conversation and select the purple Hide Alerts option particularly useful if you're in a noisy group who can't quit talking about last night's football game. If the bubble is blue, you're talking to a fellow iMessage user. It's easy enough to send and receive messages in the Messages app, and telling apart iMessages from text messages is easy as well - if the messages you send are green, it's a text message. Messages is a robust app, with plenty of hidden features.
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We go into detail about Messages in iCloud and how to activate it on your Mac here. That also means if you opted to have conversations only stored for 90 days, then your iCloud backup of Messages will follow suit. Keep in mind, if you delete a conversation from one device, it will be deleted from all of your devices. The short version of instructions is this: Open Settings > tap on your name > iCloud and make sure the toggle next to Messages is turned on. Apple uses iCloud to back up and sync your Messages conversations (that includes text messages, too). Having a constant backup of your iMessage conversations that syncs across all of your Apple devices is another one of my favorite benefits of Apple's messaging platform. Messages in iCloud keeps everything in sync and backed up. If you're new to iMessage and are unsure how to turn it on, skip to the bottom of the post. Take a few minutes, go through each option, and decide how you want Messages to behave. The rest of the settings determine things like if read receipts are for on every iMessage conversation, whether or not you want text messages (those green bubbles) forwarded to your other Apple devices or kept on your iPhone, how long you want to keep messages on your device, and so on. I have a thorough walkthrough of that process here. Or if you don't have an iPhone, but use iMessage on a Mac and iPad, then make sure your Send & Receive settings look identical. Luckily, it's an easy fix: Don't use your email address(es), use only your phone number in the Send & Receive section of Message's Settings. I can't tell you how many times I've been asked why some messages are showing up on a Mac or iPad, but not an iPhone - or the other way around.