iMessage Effects Tutorial: Turn Photos into Confetti Bursts!

Here's a really fun trick you can do on your iPhone using iMessage to surprise, shock, embarrass, or whatever you wish with your friend. I've got a photo here of a terrifyingly life-sized Lego clown minifigure—giant figure, I don't know—and I'm going to long press on it to extract the subject from that image. You know it works because you get that silvery-gold sparkle effect.

Now, with my finger still on the screen, I'm going to use my other hand and swipe up out of Photos. You'll notice here that the image is still stuck to my finger, even though I'm not in Photos anymore. In fact, I can move around the whole iPhone as long as I keep my finger on the screen holding that picture. But I want to jump straight into Messages, and what I'm going to do is drop this picture into the message box where you'd normally type, just like this.

From here, I could just send it as an image, but that doesn't really have much impact and it's certainly not very fun compared to what we could do. By long pressing the blue send button here on this screen, I want to tap at the top where it says "Screen Effect," and then straight away you get the impact of that Echo effect—hundreds of little tiny and giant clowns all floating across the screen. In fact, all you can see is Lego clowns.

When I press send, it will then send it just like this to the recipient, and their phone will be taken over by that image as well. I'm sure there are plenty of shenanigans to be had with this cool little quick tip.