There are a number of reasons that can cause your iPhone not to send pictures, which is
annoying because it's one of our favorite things to do with iPhones.
Since there are so many different fixes for this problem, we're going to start with the
simple ones and hopefully this will fix your phone.
First thing to do is to close out your apps, all of them.
If you have an iPhone X or newer, just swipe from the very bottom of the screen with your
finger and just hold there until the app switcher appears.
Then swipe all your apps off the top of the screen.
Next thing we're going to do is reboot the phone itself.
So if you have an iPhone X or later, press and hold either volume button and the side
button until slide to power off appears and swipe across the screen with your finger.
If you have an iPhone 8 or older, just press and hold the power button and slide across
the screen with your finger. You know how to do that.
Let's press and hold the side button here to turn this back on.
Apple logo appears. I let go.
Your phone is rebooted and what you should do pretty much after all the steps is try
sending your photo again. You know how to do that.
That's why you're here. And this is where the video becomes a little
bit of a choose your own adventure, at least for the next minute or so.
So we're going to cover iMessage issues first, which if you're texting a person and it's
blue bubbles, iMessage, and then we're going to get into text message issues or MMS message
issues, which are going to affect your ability to send pictures to Android users.
Let's start with the iMessage people. iMessage uses cellular data or Wi-Fi,
the internet, to send photos from your phone to somebody else.
So if you're connected to Wi-Fi, which my phone is right here, swipe down from the upper
right hand corner of the screen to open control center and then disconnect from Wi-Fi.
That's going to put my phone on the cellular network and that's how I'm going to test to
see if the Wi-Fi is the issue. Now I would try sending the photo again to Zach.
If you aren't on Wi-Fi, I would say do the opposite.
Swipe down from the upper right hand corner of your screen to open control center and
then connect to a Wi-Fi network and try sending the photo.
We're trying to figure out here if it's a problem with your internet connection and
not necessarily a problem with your phone itself. A lot of people say we go fast
through these settings and we do. We also have a guide on how to fix this
that if you join our channel, you can download and follow along at your own pace.
Sounds good to me. Let's have some fun here.
I'm going to send John Upfong, he's not a real person, but it's another phone number,
a photo of Shaka looking at her little cat house. She's a pretty girl.
All right. Sort of waiting for this delivered
to happen and it's not happening. Why isn't that happening?
Well, if you don't see delivered, it could be a couple of things.
Could be your connection, but a lot of the time it could just be that the other person
is not connected to the internet so the photo can't go through.
Or the person used to be an iPhone user and they decided to get an Android, but your phone
is still trying to send an iMessage. Either way, you could press and hold on the photo
and say, send as text message. Bang.
Sent as text message and now if I check John's phone, look at that clever little animation
there, Android. What's cool is that your iPhone, once
you send a text message, will keep sending text messages until it detects that the person
has logged back in with iMessage, in which case it'll switch back automatically for free.
All right. iMessage only section over.
Let's say you're having a problem sending messages to somebody with an Android.
Green bubbles. We're already in
messages, so I'll scroll down to MMS messaging. When MMS messaging needs to be on to send photos
to Android people or non-iMessage people, send as SMS is different.
That's just the text messages. MMS, everything else except
for those basic text messages. Also, just for good measure, toggle
this MMS messaging switch off and back on again. A lot of this turn off, turn back on thing works
for your cable box, works for the settings app on your iPhone, works for everything.
Next step, back to the main page of settings, tap back in the upper left-hand corner of
the screen, scroll up, not all the way to the top, but to general, tap on that, then
tap about, and we are going to wait to see if there is a carrier settings update.
The only way to tell is by waiting. Wait 10 to 15 seconds,
nothing appears, you're up to date. If something did appear, tap the update button,
just tap it, just because carrier settings update.
This has to do with your carrier settings. The choose your own adventure part of
the video is over. We're back together.
We're going to talk about universal fixes for iMessage and MMS messaging.
The first thing we're going to do is update iOS. So tap back to general in the upper left-hand
corner of the screen, tap on software update, wait, my iOS is up to date.
If yours is not, there could have been a bug that was fixed that solves this problem.
So update. Next step, VPN device profiles.
Sometimes they can get in the way of trying to send photos because they can kind of take
control of the carrier settings on your phone. So tap back in the upper left-hand corner of
the screen to general, then scroll down to VPN and device management, tap on that.
If you have a VPN, turn it off, try sending the photo again.
If you have a device management profile installed and it's from your school or your workplace,
might not want to delete it right away, but also could be the reason
why your photos aren't sending, talk to them.
If you see a device management profile from somebody you don't recognize, get it the heck
off your phone because it could be messing you up. And check out our video about iPhone privacy
right away because, uh-oh, will your iPhone not send photos to everyone or just one person?
If it's just one person, the problem could be on their end.
Like they're not connected to the internet and they didn't pay their cell phone bill.
Oops. Then it wouldn't go through.
They might have to do something on their end. There's nothing wrong with your phone.
Call them on the phone, yell at them. If they won't send to anyone, then it's
probably an issue with your phone itself. I have a couple of questions for you.
First off, how old is the phone you're trying to send it to?
Is it a StarTAC? Is it a flip phone?
Might not work with the newer iPhone, but I don't think that's going to help most people.
Next, did you just get a new phone? Did you get an eSIM phone?
There have been issues where it's taken a couple of days or people have had to contact
their carriers to activate iPhones on eSIM. If you're sending to an Android phone,
there was a weird bug that used to happen. Maybe it's still popping up here and there.
And let me show you how it works. We're in the contact card now
because I didn't want to have Zach have to go in and blur everything.
But if you're sending to an Android user, for instance, and you look in here and their
phone number is iPhone and the phone number there, sometimes that signals to your phone
that they have an iPhone. You should go in here and change it to mobile.
I think this issue is pretty much resolved by now, but we're going to change it anyway.
Tap edit in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, then next to iPhone, or actually
not next to it, tap right on iPhone, and then tap mobile at the top and tap done in the
upper right-hand corner of the screen, changes to mobile.
Try sending it again. And before we get to our final, final steps,
we have to talk here because I don't want to tell you to reset your
phone if you don't have to. First thing, contact your carrier
if you're having this problem. Dial 611.
It's the easiest way to give them a call. They might be able to reset
something or help you to fix it. That way you're not taking the time to do a reset.
Second, especially if it's a problem with iMessage, you can contact Apple or check their
system status page to make sure that iMessage is not just down for now.
We don't want that. Don't want to waste your time, people.
Your time is valuable. It's better spent hitting the subscribe button
than it is resetting your phone if you don't have to.
Let's get to the big fixes now. I'll go to settings on my phone, come
down here to general and scroll all the way to the bottom and tap transfer or reset iPhone.
Then send it to us and get a new one. No.
Then tap reset. Then tap reset network settings.
And this is going to clear out the network settings on your phone, Bluetooth devices.
Make sure you know your Wi-Fi password. Hopefully that is also stored in iCloud.
This is going to delete your Bluetooth devices, your Wi-Fi passwords, it's going to reset
your VPN profiles. It's kind of a pain in
the butt, but it can fix this problem. That's why it's not first on the list.
And the next tip, if this doesn't work and you're positive everything else is working
on your phone, is to try DFU restoring your phone. That stands for device firmware update.
Takes everything off of your phone and puts it back on again.
And that's what they'll do in the Apple Store if they can't figure it out any other way.
We have a separate video on that that you should go and watch.
You've done the DFU restore or the reset network settings or you haven't because you're thinking
this is way too much and I'm just going to look for a different solution for sending
these photos because the text message app isn't that great anyway.
So I want to recommend Google Photos.
Even if you are an iPhone user. I was recently in Colorado.
I took a lot of pictures. They were nice.
I tried sending them to people with Androids. They look like crap.
Why do they look like crap? Because Apple doesn't want to build in the
features to the iPhone that would make them not look like crap.
I had somebody say to me the other day, in all earnestness, and she's wonderful.
I love her. She's great.
She said to me, Dave, you know, I would use an iPhone, but they're just so much harder
to use than Androids. And I said, oh yeah, I can see how you would
think that because I didn't want to get on anybody's bad side.
But what? I guess it's true.
It's what really goes to show that what you're familiar with is what's easy.
If we helped you fix your phone, well, that just warms my heart a little bit.
If you would leave us a comment, drop a like, share this video with your friends who are
also having problems with their iPhones, not sending pictures.
They'll thank you for it. We'll see you soon. Watch this video next!