How To View Timestamps In Messages For Mac

Open the Messages app and navigate to a conversation thread. Once there, make a swiping gesture onscreen by swiping your finger from right to left. As you swipe, the timestamps for each message. By default, your messages should show the timestamp instead of the date. The date will only appear if the conversation history is more than 24 hours. However, you may check your Skype settings Click Skype on the top menu Preferences Messaging and check if you have the option to enable the timestamps for your messages. Hey, Thanks for the reply, yes indeed it would be impossible to cater for formatting the message in all the ways but, the basic idea behind the request for a timestamp in the retained messages is it would be better to get the arrival time if it has a timestamp being set either by the publisher and if not, the broker could add a UNIX timestamp to the payload so that it would be easy for the. But here's what I discovered: on Android messages, u can press and hold a RECEIVED message, go to the menu at top right, and press View Details to see the exact time it was sent and received. But you CANNOT do that with SENT messages. You can press View Details but it won't give you any timestamp. How to See When a Text Message was Sent or Recieved by viewing timestamps for individual texts and iMessages in iPhone or iPad. Launch the Messages app from the Home screen of your iPhone or iPad.

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How To View Timestamps In Messages For Mac

How To View Timestamps In Messages For Macbook

Love it or hate it, iOS 7 has introduced a radically new user interface to the Apple iOS devices. Whatever you think about the change of interface, there are some great new features available.

For me, one of the most useful additions is the ability to view timestamps for individual text messages.

Have you ever had a text conversation with someone and found that there’s only a timestamp every now and then on the messages? Prior to iOS 7, previous versions of iOS would usually group together messages sent only a few minutes apart, displaying them with a single timestamp.

Now you can easily see a timestamp for every individual message in a conversation.

As usual, it’s one of those ‘easter egg’ features that Apple like us to discover. So, here’s how to discover it!

To view these individual timestamps:

Step 1. Open the Messages app from the Home screen of your iOS device (or whichever folder you have moved it into).
Step 2. Tap on the message conversation that you would like to view a specific timestamp for.
Step 3. From anywhere in the main message area of the screen, swipe your finger from the far right to left to reveal timestamps for each individual message.

Here’s an example of a typical message conversation by default NOT showing the individual message timestamps:

As you can see, there are no timestamps for each message, they are all grouped together, linked to ‘today at 11:34’.
However, with a quick finger swipe to the left, you can now see at which time each individual message was sent:

If you haven’t already discovered this feature, I hope, like me, you’ll find this really useful. This works for iMessages (blue bubbles) as well as texts sent via SMS (green bubbles).

Disclaimer:

While the author has taken care to provide our readers with accurate information, please use your discretion before acting upon information based on the blog post. Amsys will not compensate you in any way whatsoever if you ever happen to suffer a loss/inconvenience/damage because of/while making use of information in this blog.

This feature has been tested using iOS 7.0.2 which was the latest iOS release at the time of writing.

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Jay Walsh
January 5, 2021 at 2:00 PM
Categories: iPhone | View Comments

Attorneys and clients often find themselves needing to accurately document and print text messages for court, mediation, or legal proceedings. Each year there are millions more legal cases where text messages are being used as evidence in a trial and also by lawyers for discovery.

Statista estimates estimates that last year in 2020, approximately 2.7 billion consumers used messaging apps to communicate. Projections say that this number will grow to three billion users by 2022. That’s a lot of messages sent via mobile devices! This includes iOS, Android, and also popular messaging apps like WhatsApp Messenger, Viber, Line, and WeChat. With text messaging and messaging apps now solidified as one of the world’s most popular forms of daily communication, the need to document and preserve text / sms messages for evidence in court has increased dramatically.

What is the best way to document and print out my messages for a court case or legal proceeding?

No matter how you preserve text messages for evidence, you'll want to make sure that the records have all of the information necessary for them to be admissible in court. Consult a lawyer for the specifics in your region about what information is required. For most legal matters the following details should be visible in your text message documentation:

The date and time of the messages.
The real contact information for the other party or parties in the text message conversation. For SMS this is a phone number. For MMS or iMessages, this is either a phone number or an email address.

Whether you are a lawyer, law enforcement official, or simply someone who has a pending court case or legal matter, there are several solutions for saving and printing text messages so that you can preserve evidence from your mobile phone's sms message history.

Reference: 'Text Messages as Court Evidence' - Lauren Gilbert, The Law Office of Natalie Gregg

iPhone

For iPhone / iPad / iTouch, we recommend using Decipher TextMessage to save and print out your text messages for court. Decipher TextMessage is already a trusted and widely used program by lawyers and law enforcement officials for preserving any messaging data in a format that will hold up in a legal environment. Features include:

The software has a free trial so you can try it out without spending any money.
Text messages are saved with a time / date stamp and by contact ensuring that your documentation will be upheld in a legal setting.
Depending on the formatting your jurisdiction requires for text message transcripts, you may need to show the iPhone contact information on every individual message. Decipher TextMessage allows you to print your text messages with the contact information on each message, or to turn that option off if you prefer.
Decipher TextMessage presents your iPhone text messages and iMessages in a similar format as seen on the iPhone. (Here are links to specific instructions about printing iPhone text messages and exporting iPhone text messages to a PDF file.)
The software saves your text messages locally on your computer. None of your data is accessible by anyone but yourself and nothing is stored in the cloud.
Decipher TextMessage also recovers deleted iPhone text messages and iMessages, a feature that is useful for attorneys, police officers, or governmental agencies for evidence. (Click here for our guide about recovering deleted text messages.)
Decipher TextMessage is compatible with any iPhone running iOS 14 all the way back to iOS 4.
The program also supports Windows 7 and above including Windows 10. Decipher TextMessage works for macOS Lion and above including Catalina and Big Sur.
You don't always need the iPhone to save your data with Decipher TextMessage. The software can access the data from an iTunes backup on any Windows or Mac computer.
Decipher TextMessage allows for combining text message conversations from more than one contact/group as well as selecting only a certain span of days or period of time depending on your needs.

Save text messages for court

Follow these steps to print and save text messages for court

Backup an iPhone on your computer.
Launch Decipher TextMessage.
Choose a contact whose text messages you want to save for court.
Select Export to save the text messages.
Open the saved PDF and choose Print to print the text messages for court, trial, or your lawyer.

All your text messages for court will be read into the software and displayed in chat bubble format with the contact and time/date stamp on each message. Here's an example of what you will see in the program:

iPhone Screenshots

Another way to print out your iPhone text messages is by taking screenshots of each text message screen on your device. To take a screenshot you press the 'Home' and 'Sleep/Wake' button to capture what is on your iPhone screen. There are various pros and cons of using the screenshot method. Some of these include:

Screenshots are quick and easy (and free!) if you only have a few text messages.
One drawback of using the screenshot method is that it is time consuming. If you have lots of messages you will need to screenshot each individual screen and organize the images into a text message transcript manually.
If you're required to show the time on every message, you'll need to slide left on the Messages app screen to reveal each message time. It's hard to do that and press the screenshot buttons, and cuts off some of the message text.
If you don't have the iPhone in your possession, there is no way to use the screenshot method.

Video Instructions - Documenting text messages for trial or legal matters

We have step-by-step instructions outlined in our helpful YouTube video which will walk you through the exact steps and directions so that you can immediately save your text messages for court, trial, or your attorney.

Android

There are several popular programs available for saving text messages from an Android device to your computer Some are free and some can be purchased for a fee in the Google Play Store. One popular app is SMS Backup +. The program stores texts in your Gmail account and lets you access them from any web browser.

The app is free so you can try it out without spending any money.
Printing out the text messages from any web browser is convenient and easy.
It requires that you have a Gmail account. If you don't, you can simply register for one and then be up and running with the application within minutes.

Android Screenshots

To take a screenshot of any Android device is fairy simple, however the commands are different depending on your specific device.

The first thing to try is pressing down the 'sleep / wake' button and also the 'volume down' button at the same time. If you see your screen 'flash' then you have successfully taken a screenshot.
For Galaxy devices and other Android phones that have a 'home' button, try holding down the home button and the power button simultaneously until you see the screen flash.
After taking a screenshot the image will then appear in the photo gallery app on your device. Simply look for the screenshot photo album and locate the image you just captured. You can then send, save, or share the screenshot depending on what is best for your needs.