How-To

Need iPad and iPhone help? Sign up for iPhone Life Insider and I’ll help you with all of your iPhone troubleshooting and iOS-related issues. Here’s a question from an Insider who wants only certain contacts from their Favorites to be able to call them when do not disturb is on.

If you're like me, you spend a lot of time each day dealing with email. The swiping gestures available for marking and flagging email messages on iPhone can save you some of that time. You can use swiping gestures to mark emails as read or unread or flag them for follow-up, as well as every other function, such as forwarding or moving to another folder. Here’s how to use swiping gestures in Mail on iPhone.

Every now and again, I decide it’s time to treat myself. My beloved House of Marley headphones recently fell apart, so I began searching for a new pair to invest in. A few Google searches later, I found myself ogling the Ultra Violet Beats Solo3 Wireless ($299) headphones. I’m a sucker for an elegant presentation, but are Beats more than just a pretty face? I’ve been using my Beats Solo3s for about two months now; so was it worth the price tag?

Is Apple’s new Clips app a replacement video editing app for iMovie? Not quite. The Clips app taps into the Instagram/Snapchat generation, offering an extremely easy platform in which users can create video stories and share them with friends. While Clips is a pretty awesome free video editing app, it’s not going to fulfill the same purposes as iMovie. For the video editing professional, Clips isn’t going to cut it for complex projects. But for the everyday person, it’s a fun new way to create professional-looking videos that are easily shareable with friends and via social media. I’ll go through everything you need to know to start creating and editing videos with the Clips app. This is the latest Apple app, and it seems that its main purpose is, simply, fun.

Learning how to use your Apple TV can be a bit of a process—just ask my mom who is still using the old silver Apple TV Remote with our new fourth-generation Apple TV. But our iPhone Life Insider program is all about breaking down the Apple ecosystem into bite-size pieces you can easily digest. From our one-minute video tips to our growing library of in-depth guides, we want to make Insider the best resource you have. And we’re passionate about it. Our latest project is the Complete Apple TV Guide, which covers everything from setting up your Apple TV and using the Siri Remote to finding the best apps for watching free movies and TV shows, plus much more. This is one of our most in-depth guides to date; check out a few of my favorite videos from the guide below and get a sneak peak of the immense value our Insider membership offers.

If you’re ditching your iPhone, whether permanently or temporarily, you’re going to need to deactivate iMessage. This is due to an issue Apple had to solve a while ago, wherein users who switched to an Android, or other non-iPhone smartphone, were missing texts from friends who were sending iMessages. If you still have the iPhone that you need to disable iMessage on, the process is super quick and easy. Likewise, there’s a simple solution even if you’ve already sold or given your old iPhone away. If you switched from an iPhone to another iPhone, this shouldn’t be an issue for you. But if you’re switching (or planning to switch) to an Android device, use this tip to deregister your iPhone from iMessage before or after you’ve gotten your new smartphone. Here’s how to deactivate and deregister iMessage on iPhone.

If you already have a Paypal account that’s connected to either your bank account or debit/credit card, sending a friend or family member money couldn’t be easier with Paypal on iPhone. The best part is that Paypal doesn’t charge you anything to send money to friends and family, which means it’s perfect for splitting a bill, settling a bet, helping a friend, or whatever other reason you might need to send them money. Here’s how to send someone money via Paypal on iPhone.

The iPhone camera keeps getting better and better, which makes us all want to improve our photography skills, whether we’re using an iPhone 6 or the fancy iPhone 7 Plus with its dual lens. But all the high-tech features won’t save your photos alone. Getting a foundation in iPhone photography techniques can help you take professional pictures on your everyday device, which is why we at iPhone Life have partnered with iPhone Photography School to bring you a comprehensive guide for beginners and advanced users alike. You’ll learn how to properly focus your iPhone camera, set exposure for well-lit pictures, use lighting to your advantage, and much more. When you become an iPhone Life Insider, you’ll get immediate access to this and all of our other awesome guides, as well as all the usual benefits of an Insider subscription.

You’ve always been able to send sketches and drawings to other Apple Watch users with Apple Watch. Now those same text message drawing options come to iPhone and iPad with Digital Touch on iOS 10. You can send sketches, fireballs, and even your heartbeat in iMessages to other iPhone users. You can also choose a photo and write your Digital Touch message over it before sending your iPhone text drawings to a friend. We’ll go over all the different things you can do with Digital Touch on iPhone or iPad. Here’s how to send Digital Touch drawings in Messages with iOS 10 on iPhone.

Instagram introduced My Story to the app a while back. My Story allows users to film or snap pictures and short videos to share with their followers. If a follower is on at the right time, they can even tune into your Story in real time, or they can tap on your circle at the top of their Instagram feed later on to watch it. Your Story lasts a day before disappearing, allowing your followers to keep up with you in yet another way. But maybe there are some followers you’d rather didn’t view your Story on Instagram. You have the option to hide your Instagram Story from specific people; here’s how.

Do you have friends who use Facebook to play games like Candy Crush? Do those friends send you constant game invites, never getting the hint that you don’t want to play? If your answer is no, consider yourself lucky. Most of us have logged on to see that all of our notifications were merely invitations to games we’ve never, ever been interested in playing. Luckily, Facebook allows you to turn off notifications for game invites and apps completely. Here’s how to never get a game invite on Facebook again. 

As any self-proclaimed social media guru can attest, there’s no shortage of intuitive social-sharing apps to pique your interest these days. Between Instagram, Snapchat, and Periscope, the ability to share moving images and live stream videos has become as easy as point and shoot. The best part is that you need not even be a videographer to achieve professional results. With the right app, publishing content (or posting that next-level selfie) on the fly is now easier than ever. Between apps that can be used to speed up or manipulate a video shot with your iPhone and amazing GIF-making apps, the following are four of our favorite free video-editing apps that let you make your own gifs on your iPhone.

I love using my Calendar app to keep track of my family's schedule. It can only be so helpful, though, when I'm the only one using it. Having a shareable family calendar means that we can all be on the same page—all the time. The family calendar just might be my favorite feature of Family Sharing! Here’s how to add an event to your family calendar on iPhone.

Instagram is my favorite form of social media. We’ve been trying to convince our web editor, Sarah Kingsbury to get an account for months. And she finally did once I invited her to join, which was easy to do within the Instagram app since she’s also my Facebook friend. If you have friends on Facebook who don’t know the join Instagram, here’s how to invite them to give it a try.

Unfollowing friends on Facebook is an easy way to stay friends with someone without seeing their posts. But maybe you want to reconnect with them now. You can easily choose to start following them on Facebook again, which will simply allow Facebook to show you their posts in your News feed. Here’s how to reconnect with people you unfollowed on Facebook.

You may have seen some really stunning artwork on Instagram recently that looks like a photo with a really intricate filter. These photos as artwork became a huge trend on social media when the photo editing app Prisma started trending. There are entire Instagram accounts dedicated to sharing Prisma photos and for good reason—they’re stunning. Here’s how to turn your photos into artwork on iPhone.

In the world of Facebook, unfriending someone is a big deal. And if you actually know the person, they’ll likely figure out you’ve unfriended them at some point and want to know why. Perhaps it’s not that serious and you would like to stay friends, but you don’t want to see what they post. Luckily, Facebook has the option to unfollow someone while remaining friends. Here’s how to do it.

A new Instagram feature allows you to upload up to ten photos and videos in one post to your Instagram feed. This creates a sort of slideshow on Instagram that you can share with your friends via your Instagram feed. The slideshow appears on Instagram much the same as a regular post, except you have the ability to swipe left and right to view the other photos or videos in the post. I’m sure Instagram users will come up with many creative ways to use this slideshow feature to its fullest. This is another improvement from Instagram on par with its deciison to finally allow users to create a second Instagram account. Nice to see the company implementing requested features. Here’s how to share multiple photos or videos to Instagram in one post.

There are two main ways to rent a movie from iTunes. If you use your iOS device or Apple TV, you have to watch the movie on that iOS device or another Apple TV. However, you can Airplay a rented movie from your device to your Apple TV. But if you want to be able to move a rented movie from one device to another, you have to download it to your computer. However, the process is basically the same whether you’re in iTunes on your iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV, or on your computer. Renting is the least expensive way to watch movies with iTunes, and I recommend using this option whenever available. Often Apple won’t let you rent new releases, but otherwise, renting is usually an option. Here’s everything you need to know about how to rent a movie from iTunes, from how to watch rented movies on iTunes, how to play iTunes movies on TV, how to download movies from iTunes, how long does an iTunes rental last, and how to delete a movie from iTunes once you've watched it.

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