Hi @eliminator_pest
Welcome to the EE Community Forums!
Many smartphones today allow you to bring your messages to life with pictures, animations and many more features. When you send messages containing such features to other phones, they might be sent as photo messages.
When a photo message is sent instead of a text message, it's because of the device you’re using, the device you’re sending a message to or the messaging platform you’re using.
EE has no control over this but here's some more information to help you avoid further charges.
Great news is that there is no charge for adding those standard yellow emoticons in your text messages on modern phones. That's because your phone actually converts it into a code, which the receiving phones reads and turn it back into an emoticon.
As your bill says, the most common way to incur charges is if you add an emoji/gif (the bigger pictures, or animated ones) to your message, or if you send a group message- your device will usually notify you the message is being converted into an MMS (picture message).
You can find out more at Text Messages Converting to Photo Messages | Help | EE, where you can also find details about adding Photo Messaging option to your line.
If you have an Apple or Android phone, you may want to activate RCS/chat messaging. If the recipient also has this activated, you can usually include images into your messages without incurring extra charges between compatible devices.
Ali
