XDA Basics: How to take Scrolling Screenshots on an iPhone

If you want to save the contents of the screen on your device, taking a screenshot is one of the best and easiest options. However, if the content is spread across multiple lines or sections vertically, like this article, for example, you’ll have to take multiple screenshots to capture the entire information. This is where scrolling screenshots come in handy. A scrolling screenshot, as the name suggests, lets you scroll down on any page and capture screenshots of every section. It then stitches all of those screenshots into one single image. A lot of Android OEMs have scrolling screenshots as a built-in feature on their custom UIs. In fact, Android 12 has the ability to take scrolling screenshots baked in (though it is not enabled by default for now).

On the iOS side of things, Apple introduced the ability to take scrolling screenshots natively on iPhone but it isn’t as straightforward as Android. It doesn’t work on all applications, you can’t store that screenshot in your gallery, and iOS 15 doesn’t make it any better either. However, it works well and should get the job done for most people. If it doesn’t, we also have a third-party app recommendation you can use to take scrolling screenshots.

Scrolling Screenshots on iPhone using Default Method

As we mentioned earlier, if you have an iPhone running iOS 13 or later, you have the option to take scrolling screenshots built into the UI itself. A lot of users may not have noticed this option in the screenshot menu since it’s not very self-explanatory, but we’ll tell you how to use it today. Note that this option is not available in all apps and is supported mainly in Safari and other first-party apps from Apple.

• If you’re not using one of Apple’s first-party apps, we suggest you open the content in one of the default apps since the scrolling screenshot option is present mainly on them. For example, if you want to capture the screenshot of an entire webpage, we suggest opening the page in Safari instead of a different browser like Chrome.
• Once you have the content you want to take a screenshot of on your screen, press the usual button combination to take a screenshot that is volume up + power button.
• Your iPhone will now capture the screenshot and display a small thumbnail on the bottom left corner of your screen. Tap on it and you will see the screenshot edit menu.
• In this menu, select the Full Page option next to Screen at the top and you’ll instantly see a scroll bar on the right with a highlighted rectangle.

• Use the highlighted rectangular box to scroll down on the page till the point you want to capture the screenshot. If you want to capture the entire page, scroll down till the very end.

• Once you have reached the desired point on the page, select Done to save it. Note you can only save scrolling screenshots as a PDF and not as a JPG or PNG image.

• Select the directory where you want to save the PDF in the Files app and your scrolling screenshot will be saved.
• To access the scrolling screenshot, open the Files app and navigate to the folder you saved it in and open the PDF.

While this is the simplest way to take a scrolling screenshot on an iPhone, the fact it doesn’t let you save it as an image but only as a PDF can be a hassle. A workaround to this problem would be to use a PDF to JPG converter to convert the screenshot into an image and download it to the Photos app on your iPhone. If you don’t want to do that, you can use third-party apps to stitch screenshots together and form a scrolling screenshot. Let’s see how you can do that.

Scrolling Screenshots on iPhone using Picsew

Picsew is a third-party app that allows you to stitch multiple normal screenshots into a single long screenshot, similar to what a scrolling screenshot would look like. It is free, simple to use, and gets the job done perfectly well. Also, it saves the screenshot as an image and not a PDF which is a lot more convenient.

There are no restrictions to using Picsew and it works for screenshots taken across the device, and in all apps, so if you’re not using a first-party app, this is the only way to capture a scrolling screenshot on an iPhone. Here’s how you can use Picsew to stitch together multiple screenshots.

• Head over to whichever app or page you want to take a scrolling screenshot of. Now, take a normal screenshot of the page till the end of the screen and then scroll down to the next section. Take a screenshot of this section and again scroll down to go to the next section. Repeat this till you have taken screenshots of every section on the page up to the desired point.
• Now, open the Picsew app and select all the screenshots that you took of the page you want to stitch together. Then, select the Vertical option.

• You’ll now see the screenshots you captured arranged one below the other with a line in between signifying where you want to merge the screenshots. You can drag the divider up or down and adjust where you want the consecutive screenshots to be cropped and merged.

• Once you’ve adjusted that, select the Share button at the top right corner and select Export to Photos and your screenshot will be saved.

If you want to automate the process of cropping and stitching the screenshots or want an additional feature in the form of scrolling screenshots by recording your screen, you can buy the Pro version of Picsew for around $2 which can be worth it if you’re going to use the feature frequently.

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This is how you take scrolling screenshots on an iPhone. It surely isn’t as straightforward as on Android, but you can use these workarounds to make it happen. Hopefully, with future versions of iOS, Apple will include a more advanced screenshot tool that can let users take scrolling screenshots on all apps across iOS as well as allow them to save the screenshots as images instead of PDFs.

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