Have you ever tried to print out your text messages from your iPhone but failed to do that? Then this step-by-step guide is for you. Your printing purpose may vary in a wide range. And You may use these printed text messages as the mementos of your study or work or even as the piece of evidence for a court case.
Here we present 4 different methods to print your text messages from your iPhone. If you are in a hurry to find the best method that suits your purpose, then here the quick analysis of the 4 methods.
- Method 1 and 2 for the ones who just want to print out a few text messages.
- Method 3, 4, and 5 for the ones who want to print out dozens or hundreds of text messages.
- If you want to print out the text messages for a legal purpose, then it is better to consult your lawyer to get to know about the valid format.
Let’s jump into the methods.
Method 1: Emailing the Copied Text to Your Email Address via Mail App on Your iPhone
If you do not want the date and time stamps data then this is the ideal method for you to print out your iPhone text messages. Remember that you can not have the contact information of the other person who engaged in the conversation.
This method is somewhat boring and tiring one. Because you have to do the copy-paste job for each of the text messages you want to print. So this method is not efficient when printing a large number of text messages. But this method is useful if you have only just a few text messages to print out for backup purposes.
Let me explain the steps that you have to follow.
Step 1. Open any text messaging app such as iMessage on your iPhone.
Step 2. Select and open a conversation from the chat history.
Step 3. Press and hold a message from the conversation that you want to print out until the “Copy/More” dialog box appears.
Step 4. Tap on the “Copy” option.
Step 5. Now go to your Mail app on your phone and compose a new email.
Step 6. Paste the text that you copied earlier into the body of the email.
Step 7. Enter your email address and give any text to the Subject field. Then Tap on the “Send” option.
Step 8. Great! Now you got a new email in your inbox. Open it. You can see an arrow icon at the bottom right corner of the screen. Tap on it.
Step 9. Select the “Print” option from the dialog box.
Step 10. Finally, select a connected AirPrint-enabled printer and start printing. It really is that simple!
If you want, you can use any other mailing apps except the Mail app on your iPhone too. The process is similar to the above-mentioned one. For example, if you prefer Gmail over Mail app and you do not have an AirPrint-enabled printer with you then you can send emails with those copied texts to your Windows computer via Gmail and directly print them out from your computer.
Method 2: Taking Screenshots and Printing Out Them as Images
This method is also suitable for printing a few text messages. Unlike method 1, you can have the contact information of the other person who engaged in the conversation and the date and time stamps data. But you still should have an AirPrint printer or your computer should connect with a printer. However, this method is still not the perfect one if you want to print a thousand of text messages at once. Moreover, you have to manually format the screenshots to neatly fit them on the printed page.
Sometimes you can present screenshots of your text messages as a piece of evidence in a court case. But before presenting them, it is better to consult your lawyer to confirm that it is ok to present them and which printing method is the best for printing them.
Here are the steps you have to follow.
- Launch any text messaging app such as iMessage on your iPhone.
- Open a conversation and scroll down to the part that you want to take screenshots.
- Take a screenshot. For that, press and hold the “Home” and “Power/Lock” buttons at the same time until the flash appears on the screen. If you want to have timestamp data of each message then you have to slide left on the screen. Check out this guide for more info.
- Once the screen is captured, tap on the “Done” link at the top left corner of the screen to save the screenshot to Photos.
- Select the “Save to Photos” option from the dialog box that appears next.
- Now go to the Photos app. Choose the screenshot that you need to print.
Note: You can select more than one screenshots at once. Just tap on “Select” and then tap on the desired screenshots.
- Then tap on the icon that is a square with an arrow pointing upwards. Now you can see the “Print” button. Tap on it to start printing from your iPhone via AirPrint printer.
- If you do not have an AirPrint printer, then you can email the screenshots to your email address and directly print them from your computer.
To do that, tap on the “Send” icon after selecting the screenshots that you want to print. Then email the screenshots to your email address. Open the new email from your computer and start to print the attached screenshots.
Method 3: Requesting a Copy of Text Message History from Your Phone Carrier
You can request a copy of the text message history from your phone carrier if you have any good reason for it. If not it is tricky to get the information from them because most of the telecommunication service providers do not disclose their customers’ sensitive data to the public. Moreover, some of them only store the contact details and date-time data of text messages removing the content part.
The process is simple. First, you have to inquire about your phone carrier’s text message policy from its customer care. They will probably ask you to give a good reason or a legal document from the court for your request. Most of the time you will have to fill out and notarize a special form given by them. If you fail to provide any legal document from the court there will be a 100% chance of rejecting your request by your service provider.
Official websites of some phone carriers allow their customers to check text messages info apart from the basic info like billing info, data usage, etc. So if you do not have enough time to spend on a phone call, then it is worth checking whether you can get the text messages info from the official website of your service provider by logging in to it.
Method 4: Exporting Text Messages in Batch using Third-Party Software and Saving as PDFs
The best way to print thousands of text messages is by backing them up on your PC and saving as PDFs. To start the process, you should have your iPhone, an iPhone manager app, a Windows or Mac computer, and a USB cable with you.
You can find many iPhone manager apps in the app market. Here, I am using AnyTrans for exporting text messages. But iMazing, TouchCopy, and Decipher TextMessage are also better alternatives to AnyTrans. Before using any iPhone manager app, check whether the app is trustworthy or not by reading reviews because these apps have access to all your data on your phone.
Let’s jump into the steps.
- Connect your iPhone to your computer using the USB cable.
- Download and install AnyTrans on your computer. Then open it. You will see the Device tab on the homepage. Click on it. Scroll Down to the section named “Choose a category below to manage your iOS content”. Select “Messages” from the categories.
- If you do not find any messages here, then click on the “Refresh” link to back up your iPhone on your computer. After that repeat the first step again.
- Click on the “Settings” icon at the top right corner of the screen. From the popup window, select .pdf from the select box next to the Message. Apart from PDF format, you can export text messages from iPhone in HTML and TEXT formats also with AnyTrans. Select any destination path you want as the Export Path. Then click on the “Save” button.
- You can find your chat history on the left side menu. Select the conversations you want to print out. To export them to your computer, click on the “To PC/Mac” button which has a laptop icon on it.
- Once the exporting is done, go to the destination folder that you selected as the Export Path. You can see the exported messages in PDF format in that folder.
- Connect your printer to the computer and start printing.
Method 5: Using iTunes Backup
The iTunes program can also be used to back up text messages on your iPhone if you sync your phone. Let’s go step by step.
- Sync your iPhone to iTunes on your PC or Mac.
- Then go to the app data folder of iTunes in File Explorer.
- Type “C:\Users\Your-Windows-Username\AppData\Roaming” on the address bar and press “Enter”.
- Find a file with an “.mddata” or “.mdbackup” extension.When you find it copy and paste it to a place you want. This file consists of the text message database.
- Now you can view and print it in any plain text editor in Notepad.
Conclusion
There are two successful methods for printing a few text messages from your iPhone in less time. They are emailing copied text messages to your own email account and taking screenshots of messages and saving them as images. If you are planning to request your message history from your phone carrier, then better be prepared to provide a set of special documents to the phone carrier.
You can export a lot of text messages on your iPhone to your computer and save them in PDF or any other suitable format using iPhone manager apps like AnyTrans and iMazing. Though these apps have a free trial to evaluate their features, you have to purchase the licenses to use them continuously. So these apps are not free.
Moreover, you can use iTunes backup for printing a lot of text messages if you sync your iPhone to iTunes.
I hope this simple guide helped you in printing text messages from your iPhone. If you have any issues related to these methods, feel free to mention them in the comment section. Moreover, share your suggestions and any other printing methods that you know with us in the comment section.