How to print text messages from an iPhone

There is no Print button in the Messages app on an iPhone. That is the whole reason this question gets asked several thousand times a month, and why most of the answers people find are workarounds.

Here are the four routes that work, in order of how much conversation you need to print.

Route 1: A few messages, printed from the iPhone

Take screenshots of the messages, then print the screenshots.

1. Screenshot each part of the conversation.
2. Open Photos, select the screenshots.
3. Tap the share button, then Print.

Fine for a handful of messages. It falls apart quickly: each screenshot is one page, the pages break mid-conversation, and there is no continuous flow.

Route 2: A whole conversation, printed from a Mac (free, and the best free option)

If your iPhone messages sync to a Mac, this is by far the cleanest free route, and it handles long conversations properly.

1. Open Messages on the Mac.
2. Select the conversation in the sidebar.
3. Scroll to the very beginning of the thread. This is the part that takes patience. Click into the conversation and hold Command + Up arrow, or scroll up repeatedly, until it stops loading older messages. Messages loads history in chunks, so nothing above what you have loaded will print.
4. Choose File › Print, or press Command + P.
5. In the print dialog, either print directly, or choose PDF › Save as PDF from the bottom-left menu to keep a digital copy first.

The result is a continuous, paginated document with images inline and messages in order.

The catch: step 3 is the whole problem. On a conversation spanning years, it can take a very long time, and if the Mac has never synced the older history, scrolling will not produce it at all. Videos and voice notes also cannot print, by definition.

Route 3: Print from an export

If the thread is long, or the printout matters, export the conversation to a file first and print that. This removes the scrolling problem entirely, because an export reads the whole conversation from the database rather than from what happens to be loaded on screen.

Tools that do this include imessage-exporter (free, command line), iMazing, Decipher TextMessage, and Message Album.

With Message Album specifically, the export is an offline website, so printing is: open index.html in Safari or Chrome, then File › Print. You get the entire conversation, from the first message to the last, with images at the resolution they were sent, and you can choose paper size and margins in the browser’s print dialog before committing to paper.

Route 4: When the printout is a record

If you are printing messages for a solicitor, an HR process, a landlord dispute or a court filing, the requirements change. A printout of a screenshot is weak evidence, because a screenshot is trivially editable and carries no proof of where it came from.

What tends to be asked for instead:

• The complete conversation, not selected excerpts. Printing only the messages that help your case is the fastest way to have the whole thing disregarded.
• Visible timestamps and participants, on every page rather than only at the top.
• The original attachments, kept alongside the printout at their original resolution, rather than only as page-sized images.
• Something that shows the copy has not been altered. An archive that carries SHA-256 checksums for its own files lets you demonstrate later that the copy in your hands is byte-for-byte the one that was exported.

There is more detail in preserving text messages as a record.

Whether any particular record is admissible is decided by the body receiving it, not by any software. What software can do is make sure you are not handing over something obviously incomplete.

Practical printing tips

• Print to PDF first, always. Check the page count before you send 400 pages to a printer. A year of active messaging is longer than people expect.
• Turn on background graphics in the browser print dialog if you are printing from an exported website, otherwise message bubbles print as unshaded text and the two sides of the conversation become hard to tell apart.
• Check the date range on the first and last page to confirm you printed the whole thread and not just the part that had loaded.
• Landscape helps for conversations with a lot of images.

Quick answer

For most people: sync to a Mac, scroll to the top, Command + P, save as PDF, then print. Free, and good enough.

If the thread is too long to scroll, or the printout needs to be complete and verifiable, export it first and print the export.