By Dan Moren

September 15, 2016 7:43 AM PT

Quick Tip: Temporarily hide iMessage stickers that obscure text

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Okay, if you’ve been mucking about with stickers in Messages this week, you’ve probably already run into one frustration: if you slap a sticker over a text message, you often can’t read some or all of that message anymore.

So far, the best workaround I’ve found is to double-tap or 3D Touch/long-press on the message that the sticker’s attached to. That brings up the Tapback menu (which lets you add reactions to a text) and temporarily hides the sticker.

Weirdly, the double-tap and 3D Touch/long-press actually appear to be slightly different actions. Double-tapping will bring up only the Tapback menu, while long-pressing will also bring up the options to Copy the text, get details about the sticker (such as what sticker pack it’s from), and the More… option that opens up Messages’s edit interface, from which you can forward and delete selected messages.

It does seem like there should be some way to hide stickers in a conversation (or at least to delete stickers you’ve sent), but at least this will help you remember the gist of that text that’s now covered in a billion images of Cookie Monster.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

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