I’ve made a bunch of videos here on the channel that contain iPhone tips,
and while I think they’re all really good, they’re usually just a random collection
of things that I’ve discovered. What I’ve not done up until now,
is just share a bunch of tips that I genuinely use, all the time, with my iPhone - because
that’s the whole point right, tips need to be genuinely useful, not just random.
So, here’s 8 genuinely useful iPhone tips that I swear by, and that I actually use often,
some of them I use every day. Stick with me until the end of the video,
I really think there are some gems in here.
OK, let’s get into it.
1 - Select multiple images or files at once I've mentioned in a previous video how you
can drag and drop things on the iPhone. So for instance here, in the Photos app,
rather than selecting a photo and then sharing it to Messages for example, what I could do is
I could tap and hold for just a second on the photo and then move my thumb or finger a little,
to kind of lift the photo from the app. Then, while keeping my thumb or finger pressed down,
I'll use my other hand to swipe up and select the Messages app, and go to my Message and then I'll
drop the Photo right in. Easy. But what happens if you want to do this with multiple photos? Do this.
Back in the Photos app, I'm going to tap and hold to select a photo and then move my thumb or finger
around a little like we did last time, to lift it from the photos app. I'm going to keep my thumb or
finger pressed down, but then with my other hand, I'm going to tap on some other photos. Notice how
each time I do this, they kind of magnetically snap to the photo that I've already got selected,
and we get this little tally number? It's creating a photo stack for us. When ready,
repeat the steps from what we did previously, and simply keep pressing down on the screen
with the hand that's holding the photo stack, and with the other hand, open another app like
Messages or Mail, and when you're ready, drop the stack of photos in. This works with photos,
but it also works in apps like Files too, so you could do this with multiple documents if you like.
2 - Use Files App for Quick Actions The Files app is a bit of a hidden gem
on the iPhone, not so much because people don't know it's there, but because I think
people either don't think it's relevant to them, or don't realise what it can do,
but let me show you a couple of ways that the Files app can be a game changer for you.
Let's say for example, that we need to send some photos to someone, but they've asked us to
compress those files into a Zip folder. There's no way you can do that in the Photos app, and while
you could download a third party app to do this, there's actually a much easier way of doing this.
In the Photos app, I'm going to select the photos that I want to send, and then I'm
going to tap the ellipsis in the lower right of the screen. I'm then going to choose Copy.
I'm then going to open the Files app, and it doesn't really matter where we navigate to here,
but I tend to do this on the desktop or in the downloads folder or somewhere like that,
so I'll choose Desktop. I'm then going to tap and hold somewhere in here for just a second to
get this contextual menu, and I'm going to choose Paste. You can see that the three photos that we
had selected are now showing here on the desktop. Then I'm going to select these three photos,
and tap on the ellipsis in the lower right of this app, and choose Compress. Just like that,
the photos have been added to a zip file, which I can then rename and send.
But notice that the photos that I selected are pretty large. They're RAW files, so even with them
being zipped, the archive file itself is massive. So what I'll do, is I'll select one of the photos,
and tap into the ellipsis menu again, but this time I'm going to choose Convert Image. I'm going
to choose JPEG, although notice how I could switch to a PNG or a HEIF file if I wanted to, and then
I'm going to choose Large. I have tried doing this in bulk by the way, it just doesn't seem to work
which is a real shame, you have to convert the images one by one it would appear, so I'll repeat
the process for the other two images. But once that's done, notice the massive difference between
the size of the converted images, versus the size of the RAW images. Now if I select those converted
images, and follow the steps to compress them, you can see just how much smaller we're able to make
the zip file. Obviously you would then select that zip file, and share it whatever way that you like.
Also, just to show you, you can select images and then do things like remove
the backgrounds from them, or turn multiple images into a PDF, which may be handy for you.
3 - View your Wifi Password If you have visitors and they
want to access your Wifi, if they're on an Apple device and they're nearby,
when they tap on your wifi, your iPhone will receive a prompt asking if you'd like to share
the wifi password with them securely. My experience is that this sometimes works,
but not always, so there is a backup option that's definitely worth you knowing about.
If you head into Settings, and then Wifi, and tap the 'I' or info button next to your wifi
connection, then tap on the password, your phone will first verify it's you using your biometrics
or passcode, but once it's verified it's you, it will then show you the wifi password. You can then
tap and hold to copy it, and can then share it as you like. I find this is most useful when I’m
adding something like a smart home device to my wifi, and I need to quickly grab the password.
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4 - Siri for immediate information Say what you like about Siri,
I think we can all agree that it lags behind the competition in terms of being a smart assistant,
but it does do a couple of things really well, and one of the features that I use the most with
Siri is it’s ability to convert things for me, quickly and accurately. Having Siri perform a
conversion for you is really simple, you’d just access it and ask it to convert. So for example,
you might say something like “convert 2000 us dollars into pounds for me”,
and Siri will give you an accurate and up to date conversion. But you can use
it for a number of other conversions as well. You might say “convert 20 feet into metres”,
or something like “convert 3 cups of flour into grams”, or whatever you need
for whatever you’re doing, I’ve found that it can generally handle most conversion tasks.
But another Siri feature that I genuinely use all the time is it’s ability to identify a song. If
you ever hear music on the TV or radio, or play from a speaker while you’re out and about, and you
want to know what it is, simply activate Siri and say “what song is this?”, and then hold your phone
as close to the music as you can. Your phone will listen for a moment, before returning an answer.
5 - Use your iPhone to measure something So long as you’ve got an iPhone SE 1st Gen or an
iPhone 6S or newer, you can use the Measure app to measure things with your phone. And if you’ve got
an iPhone Pro model, so that’s a 12, 13 or 14 Pro, the built-in LIDAR feature makes this function
even easier and even more accurate, although it will work on all of the devices I just mentioned.
Say you’re out and you see a piece of furniture that you’d like to buy, but you need to measure
it, and don’t have the means to do that with you. Use your iPhone. Open the Measure app,
either by locating it on your phone’s home screen or by going to Spotlight search and finding it
from there. The process might look slightly different depending on the phone that you use,
so on my 2022 iPhone SE for example, you don’t get the automatic guides or anything like that,
whereas on my iPhone 13 Pro for example, everything kind of locks automatically into place
thanks to that LIDAR scanner, but essentially you’re going to tap on the plus button to add a
waypoint, and then do that again wherever you want to measure to. It’s as simple as that,
and you can then tap on the measurement and choose copy to copy the value to the clipboard, or you
can tap on the icon in the upper left to view all of your recent measurements and do the same here,
so if you want to quickly put these into a Note for example, this is how you would do that.
And if your device recognises that you’re trying to measure a rectangle, like mine has here,
you can literally just tap the plus button once, to grab the measurements for it in a single go.
Also, probably worth mentioning that if you go to Settings, and scroll down to Measure,
you can change your measurement units between imperial and metric as you need to.
Now, would I rely on this the same way that I’d rely on a tape measure in terms of precision
accuracy? No, but this is very, very good, more than enough if you need a quick measurement,
and your iPhone is always in your pocket or your bag right?
Oh and whilst we’re here, it would be rude not to mention the Level button down in the
bottom right of the screen, which allows you to use your iPhone as a spirit level. Again,
it’s not going to replace a professional tool, but it’s good enough to get you out of a bind.
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6 - Vital Text Tips I think in most of these videos
where people talk about life changing iPhone tips, something related to the keyboard comes up,
which makes sense, we all spend a lot of time typing on our devices. I’ve made a
couple of videos entirely dedicated to the iPhone keyboard which I’ll link to in the
description of this video, but I’ll include my two favourite tips here.
First up, you can use the Space bar as a trackpad, to move your cursor around a passage of text with
incredible accuracy. To do this, when the keyboard is onscreen, simply tap and hold the space bar and
then begin to move your finger or thumb around on the screen. The cursor will move with it, and you
can drop it wherever you like, which means you can make quick edits on the fly, even with one hand.
The other tip that I use all the time is text replacements. Go into Settings, then General,
then Keyboard and choose Text Replacement. In here, tap the plus button in the upper right of
the screen. In here, you can choose a phrase, that you’d like to be swapped in for a shortcut when
you type it. So for example, I’m going to create one where I’m going to put PHT in the shortcut,
and Proper Honest Tech in the phrase box. Then each time I type pht on my keyboard, my iPhone
will immediately swap it in with the phrase Proper Honest Tech, saving me from having to type it.
Get creative with this, there are loads of useful things you could include in here. Some of the best
that I’ve seen are things like having the shortcut @@ input your email address, or inputting the hash
key twice to input your phone number. Some people use it to input emojis, I guess your
mileage is going to vary with this one, but you can hopefully see how much scope there is here.
7 - Focus Modes Focus modes are a
method of changing the look and feel of your iPhone, depending on what you’re
doing at that moment in time. So the most obvious example is to have a mode for work,
and then a mode for when you’re not working. When you’re in Work mode, your iPhone can automatically
switch over to a totally different home screen, with a different background image, and different
apps showing on the home screen, you could have all of your productivity apps showing for example,
but hide things like Instagram or Facebook. And then, you could have a Personal focus mode,
and that could have all of your apps that you enjoy using in your downtime,
and hide things like Slack or your email. You can even choose to allow notifications from
certain apps and people within specific focus modes, or disallow them. So if you’ve got a
friend who’s forever pestering you while you’re at work, this could be a way to handle that.
To setup a Focus Mode, open Settings, and choose Focus. Choose the relevant Focus Mode, or you can
use the plus in the upper right to choose from some more presets, or even create a custom focus
mode. If I tap on Work, I can configure it. So in People, this would be the people who I either want
to allow, or specifically not allow to contact me during work mode, you can choose how you want to
configure this. Then in Apps, the same principle applies, it’s just for app notifications.
Further down, under Customise Screens, I can choose how I’d like the home screen to look
for this particular focus mode, by tapping on Edit. I can either create a new page,
or choose from an existing one, and when you choose one,
you can choose Edit Apps down at the bottom, to allow you to choose which apps to show.
Your phone will make recommendations, but it’s entirely up to you of course.
A bit further down is Smart Activation, and a schedule. Schedule is exactly what it sounds like,
you could have work toggle on at 9am, off at 5pm every week day for example. Smart
activation is a bit smarter, this can be based on things like if your phone knows
that you’ve arrived at the office, or arrived back at home for example.
8 - Control Centre The control centre isn’t exactly a sexy, exciting,
brand new tip or anything like that, but in a video all about the features of the iPhone that
I genuinely use every day, it would be wrong of me not to include it, because I use it all the time.
On an iPhone with no home button, you’re going to swipe down from the top right of the screen,
on an iPhone with a home button, you’re going to swipe up from the bottom, and then you’ve got the
control centre. Your control centre allows you some space for shortcuts down here at the bottom,
you can generally have as many as you like, obviously on a larger phone you can fit
more on the screen at one time, on a smaller phone you might have to scroll to view them.
To change what you see here, go to Settings, then Control Centre,
and simply choose from More Controls. Anything you like the look of, tap the green plus to add it.
You can of course choose whatever works for you. I’ve got the following;
Access to the torch or flashlight, whatever you call it in your region. Quick access to
the calculator. Quick access to the Apple TV remote. This is great if you own an Apple TV
box in your home, as this allows you to connect your iPhone via bluetooth to that Apple TV,
and you can control the box using your iPhone instead of the included remote.
Quick access to the camera, quick access to create a quick note.
Quick access to screen record - by the way, little bonus tip for you, if you press and hold,
you can not only choose where the finished screen recording should go, the default is your photo
library, you can also choose whether to have the microphone on or off while you’re recording. It’s
off by default, but if you ever need to send someone a video of an issue with a commentary
of the problem for example, toggle this on, and then you can talk away while you’re filming.
I’ve got my Apple Wallet here, then quick access to low power mode, then Shazam which is basically
the method of quickly identifying a song if you don’t want to use Siri, then quick access
to the stopwatch, then quick access to voice memos, and finally quick access to alarms.
End So there you go,
8 tips that I genuinely use every single day on my iPhone. What do you think, any game changer
tips that you swear by that should have been included here? Drop me a comment and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.