System tower · floor

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

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 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 tap Full Page. Apple’s instructions from there are worth reading carefully, because the two ways out are not equivalent. You can “Save as an image: tap, then tap Save to Photos”, or “Save a PDF: tap, tap Save PDF to Files, then choose a location.” A full-page capture saved as a PDF does not go to your photo library at all — it goes to Files, wherever you send it, and that is where a full-page capture goes missing.

Where the ordinary ones land is documented and slightly buried: “By default, screenshots are saved to your photo library in the Photos app. To see all your screenshots, open Photos, 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 only the portion you want” — 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 or a booking reference, that is the difference between a useful image and a screen full of app furniture.

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

What this tower will not do

It will not tell you to install an app for this. Everything on this floor 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 pretend a full-page capture is a photo. It is a PDF in Files unless you tell it otherwise, and that one sentence saves the search. What holds instead is simple: the three button pairs, the change to the preview, the Screen Capture settings and the full-page routes are quoted from Apple’s own documentation, listed below.