How To Add An Attachment To A Facebook Message
Knowing how to attach files to messages allows friends and family to share a wealth of experiences within Facebook chat, providing users with the ability to include pictures, videos, and other files along with their text.
First, the instructions for attaching a file to a new message:
- From your homepage, move your cursor to the left panel of your screen. Select “Messages” from the list of buttons including, “News feed”, “Events”, and “Photos”.
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Once you’ve clicked on “Messages,” you’ll be taken to your inbox. From the inbox screen, click the “New Message” tab at the top, next to the “actions” button, which you’ll use momentarily.
Facebook will prompt you to enter the names or email addresses of the friends you’d like to begin a conversation with. If the person has a Facebook account, typing letters of their name into the box causes Facebook to pull potential matches from your friend list for people you may be attempting to add. Select the correct friend, and repeat this process until you’ve added all the people you want. You’re now free to begin a conversation, and attach images.
Now, we can look at the instructions for users who want to add attachments to already established conversations:
- If you’re trying to add an attachment to a previous conversation, scroll through the list of conversations on the left hand side of your screen, and select the thread with the user to whom you’d like to send files. The message you’ve selected will expand into the middle of the screen.
- The box at the bottom of the page allows you to “Write a Reply” “add files” and “add photos”. If you’re trying to upload pictures, select “add photos”. A box will pop up on your screen, prompting you to select the appropriate file from your hard drive. (Give the desired file an easily identifiable name and location to make this step faster.)
- Once you’ve identified the proper file, click the blue “open” button on the bottom right of the screen. The box will disappear, and the file will show up on the bottom of the conversation text box. A wave of blue lines will flash by opposite the file, showing you that the file is being loaded into the conversation. When a clickable “X” in a box replaces the lines, the file is ready to send. Make sure that your message contains all the text you’d like to accompany the attachment, and click “Send”.
Other things you need to know:
- To review a simplified version of the clicks involved: Select messages; either start a new message and choose your friends, or reopen an existing message; click “add file” or “add photo” ; locate file on your computer; Click
open, wait for the file to load, and click “send”. All finished!
Facebook is a wonderful multimedia-accessible tool, allowing users to communicate with friends and family with a variety of text, picture, video, and event organizing options. But without knowing how to attach one of these files to your messages, your conversations are lacking useful communicative tools, and aren’t living up to their full potential.