My conversations with friends have evolved to the point where we barely communicate. Rather than expressing our love or pity for the suffering that is the human experience, our daily interactions are a tit-for-tat about who can make the best joke or mock the best meme. The meme wars are fierce and when all else fails, the exploding text is my secret weapon. If you use it tactfully, nothing is funnier. Even your most online friends may not know.
Sending explosive photo texts is easy, you just combine a few less used iPhone features. The hardest part is choosing the perfect image. Unfortunately I can’t help you with that. Either you have the touch or you don’t.
You can make any image explode, but the effect works best if you remove the background from an image and use only the silhouette of the main thing in it. Apples Photos app will do that automatically. This is also useful for many other purposes. Unfortunately for all the Android fans out there, this all only works between iPhones. Tim Cook may not love you if you’re reading this on a Pixel or a Samsung, but I still do.
Open the image with the iPhone’s default Photos app; this part will not work anywhere else. Then tap and hold the part of the image you want to cut out. The image should pop out almost immediately, with a white outline flashing over it. The app can’t do this with every photo, so if you don’t succeed at first, try another image. The Photos app handles it better when an object or person is clearly the subject of the image, as opposed to something like a group photo with friends.
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Then tap Copy. For some reason this doesn’t work when you use the share button. Now open a text thread with your victim in iMessage and paste the photo into the send field.
Have your trigger finger ready and press and hold the Send button. There are a few effects to choose from. For example, “Slam” drops the image onto the screen and Invisible Ink hides it behind a sparkling filter. That stuff is amateur hour. What you want is an explosion. Press “Screen” at the top. “Send With Echo” is the first effect in that category, which is what you want.
Then tap Send and boom, exploding message. Now you are the funniest person in the group chat. It’s up to you if you want to gatekeep this prohibited technology or tell your friends how to do it (Just kidding, please send them this article. I need the advertising money to feed my family).