Software · guide

How to screenshot on iPhone, and what changed after you press

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 23 September 2026 · 11 min read

The buttons are the easy half. How to screenshot on iphone has two answers — which pair to press, which depends on the phone, and what happens next, which Apple changed recently enough that guides written a year ago now describe the wrong thing.

Apple repeats the same instruction on all three, and the emphasis is Apple’s rather than ours: press and release quickly. It is the one detail the wording insists on in every version of the page, which makes it the first thing to try again when a press appears to do nothing.

If you liked the corner thumbnail — and there is a good reason to, because it let you carry on with what you were doing and deal with the picture later — it is not gone. It has become a setting, in a menu that did not use to exist.

That second item is worth a sentence of its own, because it explains a problem that looks like nothing to do with screenshots. A screenshot taken in HDR is an HEIC file; one taken in SDR is a PNG. Upload the first to a form that accepts only JPEG and PNG and it is refused, and nothing on the refusal screen will connect that to a display-quality setting you have never opened. Apple also notes that on an ordinary screen the HDR version buys you nothing: “On standard displays, HDR screenshots appear in SDR format.”

The refusal is not Apple’s doing, and the machine on the other end says so plainly. Microsoft describes the format as the ordinary output of these phones — “HEIF and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) are the default file formats for photos and videos on most Apple devices running iOS 11 or later” — and states what a Windows PC needs before it can open one: “To open and downloaded HEIF and HEVC files on your Windows computer, you may need to install a codec.” It repeats the point for anything that is not an Apple device: you “may not be able to open them without additional apps”. Microsoft is writing about photographs rather than screenshots, and this page will not stretch that further than it goes — but it is the same file format, and it answers the question the refusal screen does not: the file is fine, and the computer receiving it has not been taught to read that kind.

The other question people arrive with is how to capture something longer than the screen. In Safari the answer is one word that appears after you have already taken the shot: press the usual pair, then “capture content beyond your iPhone screen: tap Full Page. To see more of the screenshot, drag your finger on the preview image on the right.” What Apple’s guide no longer spells out is where the result lands, and the omission is worth noticing rather than filling in: the sentence about saving is about the ordinary kind — “to save full-screen screenshots to your photo library, swipe up, or tap, then choose an option”. A full-page capture is the other kind, and the page linked below follows it to where it actually goes.

Where the ordinary ones land is documented and slightly buried: “Screenshots are automatically saved to your photo library. Go to the Photos app on your iPhone. Tap Collections, scroll down to Media Types, then tap Screenshots.” Two taps deeper than the Albums list, and worth knowing because a phone accumulates screenshots faster than anybody decides to keep them.

One last thing the current preview does that the old thumbnail did not. Before you save anything you can crop it — Apple: “Crop: drag the handles. To save a smaller portion of a full-page screenshot, tap, then drag the handles.” — which means the trimming that used to be a second trip into Photos is now part of taking the picture. On a screenshot of a receipt you will have to find again or a booking reference, that is the difference between a useful image and a screen full of app furniture.

The guides below take it four ways: the buttons themselves, what the preview now does, capturing more than one screenful, and where the files end up.

Not covered here. It will not tell you to install an app for this. Everything on this guide is already on the phone, and the one genuinely useful extra — tapping the back of it — is a setting rather than a download.

It will not describe the corner thumbnail as though it were still the default. Apple changed it, says so in the present tense, and a guide that has not noticed is a guide written before June 2026.

And it will not tell you where a full-page capture lands. Apple’s guide used to name the two ways out and no longer does, so that question is answered on the page that follows it, not guessed at here. What holds instead is simple: the three button pairs and the change to the preview are quoted from Apple’s own documentation.