How to Read the Beginning of an Imessage Conversation on Mac

If you have an iPhone or Mac, and want to get to the kickoff of a long text bulletin conversation, you lot don't take to manually scroll through pages and pages of the text message thread to view former messages. Hither's an easier fashion to do information technology, along with how to search text bulletin history, and how to print out all or some of those text messages!

First, to review, to become to the get-go of text messages on an iPhone y'all tap the very top of the screen repeatedly, while in the thread. To go to the beginning of a text message thread on your Mac, you just keep pulling the scroll bar upwardly, over and over, until you reach the acme.

And it has to be said correct up front that iMessage on both the iPhone and the Mac has a search bar:

However, the native iMessage search is seriously limited on both the iPhone and the Mac. On the Mac, even with a specific thread selected, the search shows yous every message thread with every contact where the search term was mentioned. Now, of course, y'all know in which thread yous are searching for that term, however when you go to that thread to view the search results, you volition see that it has taken y'all to the very offset instance of that word actualization in that text bulletin thread. (To cycle through each of those instances within that thread, employ 'control-m'.)

It's fifty-fifty worse on an iPhone. Oh, it's fine if you are just searching to detect that text bulletin that y'all know you received from, let's say, Joe, and information technology was a recent message, as then the fastest way to exercise that search is to become to Joe's text message thread, roll upward to a message from a date before you lot think the one you were searching for was sent, and only read the darned thread, without using the iPhone's iMessage search bar.

The thing is, on an iPhone that search bar will only search messages that are already loaded; the default number of screens loaded in iMessage seems to be virtually 8 to 10 screens' worth on either the iPhone or the Mac. Moreover, if you lot go into Joe's thread, and scroll up and up to get past the date in question, when you lot get out Joe'southward thread it will default back to the last 8 or x screens, so there is no way on the iPhone to directly search older text messages.

And even on the Mac, if you are trying to search through an old, long text message thread – or trying to print that whole long text message thread (or a part of it) whether to PDF or actual paper – it is tedious and laborious to have to whorl through dozens, if not hundreds, of pages in the text bulletin thread. The bottom line is that it's just not feasible to do this without installing an app specially made to help y'all search all those messages (we found one commodity claiming to tell you how to do it without a third-party app, but all that article said to practice was coil, coil, scroll your mode to the acme – who has the time to do that with very long text bulletin threads?)

So read on, we're going to tell you near the app that we personally use, and give yous the link.

How to Search and Impress from an Old, Long Text Bulletin Thread on Your Mac

This information is specific to Macs – it will non work directly on your iPhone, but hopefully you are already using iMessage on your Mac every bit well, and saving all text message history (if you aren't, why not?)

Here are the Mac iMessage settings to brand sure that yous are archiving text messages on your Mac:

Mac Settings to Save and Archive Text Letters from iMessage

The above is how you should have your iMessage preferences set to brand sure that your Mac is archiving text letters.

For more information on where your Mac stores and archives your text messages see our commodity Where Messages are Archived and Stored on a Mac and How to Search All of Your iMessage Messages or iChat Messages.

Ok, and so you have your text message threads being saved on your Mac. If you read the other article, you know that they are archived by date, not by contact (although they are archived by contact within the date folders, and so technically they are archived by contact by appointment).

That ways that while theoretically (and actually) yous tin use the search bar in your Finder app to search within those folders, because iMessage stores messages in folders by engagement, not past contact, it's not very practical.

Macs Store Text Messages in Folder by Engagement and Individual Contacts are in the Particular Date Folder

All in all, ridiculously difficult to search – much similar the proverbial needle in the haystack.

And this is where the app comes in. The app is called Chatology, and you can download it hither (this is non an affiliate or incentivized link, nosotros just love the programme): flexibits.com/chatology.

Chatology takes all of your iMessage archives and massages them into a single, straight-forrard interface from which you can search your text letters starting from the beginning of time, upwardly to the present infinitesimal.

When you first showtime Chatology, yous are able to tell it to load just text messages from the current solar day, or the past week, or the by month, or the past year.

Or all text messages from all time.

When you search using Chatology, excerpts of each paragraph in which your search term appears are displayed for you (newest to oldest) and so that you lot have context and tin can zero in on the exact bulletin you are looking for. This ane characteristic alone makes searching with Chatology and then much easier than using the native iMessage search tool!

What's more than, you can print or save to PDF an entire text bulletin conversation! Or just select a portion of the conversation if you prefer to do that.

We take used Chatology several times now for this very office, and it works extremely well, whether printing out the text letters, or saving them to PDF.

So, if you're just trying to find a particular bulletin from a recent thread of messages, by all means use the ringlet-and-search method available on both your iPhone and your Mac. Only if you have to get back more than a few weeks, Chatology is your best bet.

Again, we have no affiliation with Chatology whatsoever, nosotros are just very, very satisfied customers.

Annotation: The Internet Patrol is completely free, and reader-supported. If something that yous notice here helps y'all, please consider supporting usa. Nosotros as well earn a small-scale amount from ads and Amazon links:

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