In this article
Open a chat's profile and everything shared in it is already sorted: photos, videos, files, links, music, voice. No searching, no scrolling — the chat has been building that index since the day it started.
Beside it there is a date bar, and tapping the date header opens a calendar. Between the two you can be at any point in a five-year conversation in about three seconds.
What you will be able to do
- check_circle Find a photo or a file without scrolling for it.
- check_circle Jump to a specific date in a long chat.
- check_circle Get from a thumbnail back to the conversation around it.
- check_circle Search inside one chat rather than the whole account.
Dragging the date bar travels through months; the calendar turns that into a specific day.
collections The index you did not build
Every file that has ever passed through a chat is filed by type in that chat's profile, permanently, without anybody doing anything. It is the single most underused feature in the app, because people go looking for a photograph by scrolling the conversation instead.
The links tab deserves a particular mention. Every address anybody has ever sent in that chat, in one list, with the page titles. For a chat where people share articles, that tab is more useful than any bookmark folder you would have maintained.
And the two navigations complement each other: tap a thumbnail and you can jump from it to the message it arrived in, so the media grid is also a way back into the conversation that surrounded it.
Four ways to find the same thing
Which one is fastest depends entirely on what you remember about it.
| What you remember | Use this | How it works | The part most people miss |
|---|---|---|---|
| The kind of thing it was | The media tabs | Photographs, videos, files, links, music and voice each have their own tab in the chat's profile, so the haystack is ninety per cent smaller before you start. | Pinch the grid to change how many fit on screen — small for scanning a year, large for recognising a face. |
| Roughly when it was | The date bar, or the calendar | Drag the bar at the edge to travel by month, or tap the date header and choose a day outright. Best for anything you remember by event rather than by wording. | It works in the media grid as well as in the conversation, so you can arrive by date in either of them. |
| A word that was in it | Search inside this chat | Scoped to that one conversation, which is what you want whenever a common word would otherwise return your entire account. | It reaches captions as well as messages — which is the real argument for writing a line when you send something worth keeping. |
| Who said it | Group search, narrowed to one member | It turns an unreadable group into a readable one, and combined with a date it reduces a hundred thousand messages to a page. | The media tabs narrow by member too, and a group is usually where the file you are hunting for actually is. |
| Nothing you can put into words | The media tabs, anyway | Recognition is much easier than recall. You will know the picture when it appears even when you could not have described it. | Tap through to the original message once you find it — the conversation around it is usually what you were really after. |
Ask what you remember — the kind, the date, the words, or the person — and use the tool that matches.
settings Getting around a long chat
- Tap the chat's name to open its profile The shared media tabs are there.
- Choose the tab matching what you are after Photos, files, links, voice.
- Pinch to change the grid size Denser for scanning, larger for recognising.
- Use the date bar or the calendar When you remember when rather than what.
- Jump from a result to its message For the conversation around it.
- Search within the chat, and by sender in a group Rather than searching the whole account.
This page is navigating one conversation. The curriculum step is searching across all of them: filtering by sender and date, the operators that narrow a query, and how to find something when you do not know which chat it was in.
At a glance
- 1Media tabs
Find photos, files and links in the chat's profile.
- 2Jump to a date
Use the calendar in chat search.
- 3Back to context
Tap a thumbnail to jump to that moment in the chat.
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