Thanks to technology, it’s so easy to share media like photos, music, latest news and podcasts with your friends and family through your phone. Apple made sharing even easier by allowing all this content in iMessage. However, this shared media can easily get lost in long conversations, especially as you turn it off to watch or read later.
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To help, Apple released a feature called Shared With You with iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey. This feature is intended to help you make sharing media easy. Here’s what you need to know about it.
What is shared with you?
Shared With You is a feature that automatically collects and organizes all kinds of content shared with you via iMessage, placing it in a dedicated section in each of the apps like Safari, Photos, and Music. For example, Shared With You allows you to find photos and videos you’ve shared with me on Messages you open the Photos app with and go to the Share with you section.
Before, anything shared with you on Messages lived in Messages. This meant you had to check your conversations and scroll back until you found the content you shared with. With Shared With You, it’s easy to revisit shared content or continue an inline conversation about a topic you’re doing about shared content.
You can engage with content shared through the feature in one of two ways: through Messages or through other supported apps.
Finding content shared with you in Messages
You can go to messages, search for contacts, and see the various content they’ve shared with you.
Finding content shared with you in other apps
Alternatively, you can open a specific app to play dedicated media and view all the photos, podcasts, or other content shared with you by different people on iMessage. Here’s what you need to do for each of Apple’s supported apps.
How to manage content shared with you
There are many ways people can interact with the content they share with you on Apple’s various supported apps.
continue your conversation
Shared With You tells you who the content came from. Not only that, but this feature allows you to continue your conversation with the sender.
pin shared content
Sometimes we set aside content shared by friends for later consumption, only to forget about them. To prevent this from happening, you can pin content in messages.
To pin content on an iPhone or iPad, open a conversation, tap and hold the content, then select Pin. On Mac, Control-click content in a conversation, then click Pin. Repeat the steps if you want to unpin it.
Doing so puts the content at the top of the Shared With You section and in the details view of your conversation. It also displays it in message search.
Limit the content shared with you
If you don’t use this feature, or if you find it a nuisance, you can always disable Share With You. You have lots of options to do this.
By default, all content shared with you on Messages by anyone saved in your Contacts list will also appear in Apple’s supported apps. If you don’t want a specific person’s shared content to appear in the Shared with you sections, just do the following.
When you do this, you’ll still find the content in the conversation thread, but not in the Shared With You section.
How to share content to other people
You can also share a variety of content with your family and friends so that it appears in the Shared With You sections. Simply select the relevant content, tap or click Share, then choose a message. Enter the name of the contact you want to send it to, then press Send.
Keep all your shared content within reach
Shared With You is a valuable feature that helps you organize all your shared content so you can find it all in one place. This can be very handy if you’re the forgetful type or if you have long, active threads, making it difficult to scroll back to find shared content.