Basic Facebook Guide: How to look up archived messages on Facebook App

How to look up archived messages on facebook App

How to View Archived Facebook and Messenger Messages
You can archive messages on Facebook to put them in a different folder, away from the main list of conversations. This helps organize your conversations without deleting them, which is especially helpful if you don't need to message someone but you still want to save the texts.
If you can't find archived Facebook messages, use the appropriate set of instructions below. Remember that Facebook messages can be accessed on both Facebook and Messenger.com.
On Facebook or Messenger

The quickest way to get to the archived messages is to open this link for Facebook.com messages, or this one for Messenger.com. Either will take you directly to the archived messages.
Or, you can follow these steps to manually open your archived messages (Messenger.com users can skip down to Step 3):
For Facebook.com users, open Messages. It's at the top of Facebook on the same menu bar as your profile name.
Click See All in Messenger at the bottom of the message window.
Open the Settings, help and more button on the top left of the page (the gear icon).
Select Archived Threads.
You can unarchive Facebook messages by just sending another message to that recipient. It will show up again in the main list of messages along with any other messages that aren't archived.
On a Mobile Device
You can get to your archived messages from the mobile version of Facebook too. From your browser, either open the Messages page or do this:
Open Messenger.
Tap the search bar at the top of the screen and type the name of the person you want to view messages for.
Select the friend whose messages you want to see from the search results and then you'll see all of the messages from that person.
How to Search Through Archived Facebook Messages
Once you have an archived message open in Facebook.com or Messenger.com, it's really easy to search for a specific keyword with that thread:
Look for the Options panel on the right side of the page, just under the recipient's profile picture.
Click Search in Conversations.
Use the text box at the top of the message to search for specific words in that conversation, using the leftmost arrow keys (next to the search box) to see the previous/next instance of the word.
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If you're using Facebook's mobile website from your phone or tablet, you can't search through the conversations themselves but you cansearch for a person's name from the list of conversation threads. For example, you can search "Henry" to find archived messages to Henry but you can't search for certain words you and Henry sent each other.

How to look up archived messages on Facebook App

So, where can you find gifs? You use a gif search engine, of course. Here are four options I like.
Giphy. In addition to being a gif host, Giphy is also a gif search engine. Gifs are tagged by uploaders with hashtags relevant to the gif, and you can search through those tags. It’s a little fickle, though. As you can see with my test search – the Secret of Kells movie – a lot of gifs simply have “secret” as a tag that comes up. Unlike most search engines, Giphy doesn’t respect quotation marks, so you can’t search for whole phrases and exclude other content.
Gifme.io.

This is a smaller gif library, sort of like a discount Giphy. As such, it won’t find nearly as many results – and in fact finds nothing for my test query – but it does find some interesting and unique results. It also sources from all over the web, and shows you content from Imgur, Tumblr, Amazon web services, gfycat, and a whole host of other sites.
Gfycat. Speaking of Gfycat, it’s one of the other top options I like. It’s all user-created as well, but it has a lot more in the way of tags, including a lot of Tumblr-like commentary tags. It also respects phrases much more completely, so my test query shows a ton of relevant results and very few extraneous results.
Google. Yes, you can use Google specifically to find animated gifs.Plug in your query, go to image results, and click “tools” off to the side. Under tools, click “type” and select animated. This filters your results to only show you animated gifs relevant to your query. You can impose other filters and use all of the standard Google search operators here as well.
In order to use a gif on Facebook, simply follow the process above to upload it to Giphy and post it in your composer. One thing to note: if you’re not certain about the usage rights of the image, make sure it’s something you can get away with using! You don’t want someone to issue a takedown because of a goofy animated gif, right?
The Easy Way: Using a Web Gif Creator

What happens if you know what you want, but you can’t find a gif of that exact moment to use? Well, that’s where you need to make it yourself. You will need a source, generally a video clip on YouTube or hosted on your local computer. To continue using the example I’ve been running with, we’ll use this video as a source.
The two main options I like to use are Giphy – again – and Makeagif.com. For Giphy, hit the “create” button in blue up at the top. For makeagif.com, click the “youtube to gif” tab. For both, paste in the YouTube URL.

For Giphy, you are presented with the video in a preview at the top. You have two sliders; a start and an end slider. Set the exact time you want the gif to start and the duration of the gif. Below that is the “caption” field, where you can add text, and set the style and color of that text, to make your own meme or caption. Below that are tags, the YouTube source, and the “create gif” button. Once you’re satisfied, click to Create Gif and it will be processed and uploaded automatically. Here’s a test I made in a few seconds.

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For MageAGif.com, you can choose a title for your gif, a category, and tags. You can enable audio and subtitles, if the source has that data, which will turn your gif into a webm format. However, Facebook doesn’t embed webms, so don’t do this. Below the preview gif on the right is the same set of sliders, start time and duration, and a create gif button. Here’s a test.

I like MakeAGif because it’s fast and simple, but it does have the downside of watermarking your final product. It also doesn’t allow you to add your own text. It’s good for quick, goofy reaction images like Buzzfeed, but beyond that it’s not useful for much. Giphy is much better in general.
The Difficult Way: Using a Gif Capture Program

A gif capture program is a program that records what’s on your screen and converts it into a gif for you. There are a lot of different ways to do this, but I prefer GifCam. GifCam is a surprisingly simple app with a lot of depth beneath the hood. You start it out and it’s just a transparent app window with buttons to the side. You resize and reposition the window to cover what you want to animate as a gif, then click “rec” to start recording a gif. Beneath the window, you do what you want, whether it’s playing a YouTube video, recording a portion of your screen, or even just dragging the window around to a different part of your screen.

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