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Comment by Pelerin | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little confused... I feel like most of these exist in some form already? I've seen chat likes, message indicators, notification reply, homescreen before.

Tagging in a chat app seems like it's trying to make a chat app be something it's not. Unless I'm wildly unfamiliar with how many people use chatting. (totally possible!)

That said, the timeline jump is the idea in here that made me say, "ok that is slick" I feel like I sometimes want to go back and find a photo someone sent me several days ago and I, well, don't even bother because I won't even remember exactly WHEN it was sent.

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Telegram supports Tags by using Hashtags which are linked an can be clicked on. When clicked, it just invokes the normal search. I mostly use it with the "Notes to myself" feature, where I can write down a quick note.

Telegram also has some form of the timeline view [1] . When tapping a date in the chat, you get a calendar in a month view. If you've sent a photo to that person on a day, that day will have a thumbnail of that photo as a background. It's a pretty hidden feature but I regularly use it to look for messages.

[1]: https://telegram.org/blog/shared-media-scrolling-calendar-jo...

In iOS Messages, if you tap on the icon at the top of the chat, one of the things that gets displayed is a list of all the photos, links and locations from that chat. So as long as you remember who sent you the photo, it should be pretty easy to find.

Except a lot of the pictures aren’t there in my experience. It’s a nice feature in theory, though.

Scroll to the bottom of that slide-up. There may be something that says "X images in iCloud". You can tap "Download" to download them all.

Also: Settings > Messages > Keep Messages > Forever

And, on that note, Settings > [Your name] > iCloud > Messages, too.

I don't now how iOS caches or retrieves that content, but I find it's not super reliable if the messages were more than a few days/weeks ago. When it works it's great, though.

You literally described a use case for tagging in your message when you said “find a photo”

The phone mock they used seems really outdated. Maybe this article is a few years old?

Or as app designers they're designing for devices people use in the real world...

I would love tagging in chat. People send each other helpful or entertaining things all the time, then 6 months later you're trying to find it and you can't remember when they sent it to you.

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