How To Take a Screenshot On an iPhone or iPad

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to take a screenshot on your iPhone or iPad plus a lot of tips and tricks.

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So to take a screenshot on your iPhone you need to use the buttons on your iPhone. Nothing that's actually on the screen. Which buttons you use depends on the model of iPhone you've got. If you have one of the newer iPhone models then you want to press the side button and the volume up button. That's the upper volume button at the same time. If you have an older iPhone with a Home button then you want to press that side button but the Home button with it at the same time to take a screenshot. If you have an iPhone or an iPad that has a button at the top rather than the side then you want to use that top button and the Home button to take a screenshot. 

When you do this you're going to get a thumbnail that appears at the bottom left hand corner. If you wait and let that thumbnail disappear then the screenshot will simply go to your Photos Library. It will just be saved there as your most recently taken photo. But instead if you take the screenshot and then quickly move your finger to the bottom and tap that screenshot there it will come up in as editor and give you all sorts of different things with it. For instance you can drag the sides or the corners to crop. So you can crop it like this to crop something out so you can just focus on the part of the screen that you wanted to capture. If you do some cropping like this you can use the Undo button there to undo it and there's a Redo button as well. Undo will work for other things as you make changes also.

So at this point you can use the Trash button just to simply Delete the screenshot. You can use the Share button here to Share it in various ways. So you have a row of icons at the top representing different apps you could send the screenshot to. So if you wanted to send it to somebody in a message you can tap on Messages. It will go to the Messages app and allow you to send that screenshot to someone. You could do the same thing with email. But you could also take the screenshot and send it to Reminders or Notes to keep it there. Other apps, like third party ones, will add themselves to this list. You could always tap more here to see what other apps may be available to add to the list. 

Below this you'll see other options. For instance you could Copy to the Clipboard so then you could Paste it later on into a document or something. You could also Print it or you could do something like Save To Files. So rather than having it saved to the Photos Library you could Save To Files right here. There's also Added Actions and you may see some more things you could add to this list. 

Now if you simply tap Done then you'll get the options at the bottom to Save to Photos which is the default. But you could also Save To Files. If you would rather not have the screenshots in the Photos Library but instead as a file that you could access in the Files app you could do so right here. This will make it available on all your devices if you're using iCloud Drive and Save the file to an iCloud Drive location. Very handy if you want to take screenshots on your iPhone or iPad but then work with them on your Mac. 

Or you can just select Delete Screenshot to get rid of it if you don't want to keep it. 

Now if you want to markup the screenshot before you do anything else with it you can use the Markup Tools. Just tap right here. There are a variety of tools here at the bottom. You have three different types of pens and pencils here on the left. So you can select one and you can draw all over the screenshot. Here's where the Undo button comes in handy. You could also Erase. So if I draw some things, like this, I can Erase them like that or I can select what I've drawn and then drag it around. You could also use the Ruler here to draw in a straight line. You can use two fingers to rotate this and then choose a pen and then draw along the edge there. If you ever need to change the colors of one of these pens just have the pen selected and tap here and then you have a variety of different ways to change the color, the opacity, or the ink coming out of that pen or pencil. 

But you can do a lot more than just drawing. You can use the Plus button here and you could add various things. For instance, some text. So here's some text. Let's change the color there and then you could click here. Change the Font. Change the Size. Of course you can drag this and move it around. Tap it right here and the editing tools come up so you can Delete. You can also add different shapes. Here at the bottom you can see rectangles, circles. You can change the shape by grabbing one of the dots or grab the entire thing to move it around. Tap it to delete or do other things with it. There are arrows that you could add. You can add a Magnifier here so it can magnify something that's on the screen. Grab one dot to change the size of the magnifier. The other dot to change the magnification. You can even sign a document here using Signatures and you can Add or Remove them really easily using yourTouchScreen.

So there are a variety of the different things you could do here to mark up the image before you do anything else with it. Whatever you add to it, if you Share it or Save it, it's going to be included with the screenshot. 

Now let's say you capture a webpage like this. There are a variety of different things you could do when you've got text in the document. One is you can tap here at the bottom and then it will show you the text that it recognizes in there. You can tap and Hold in there and then select some of the text or select All. There are various different things you can do using these controls. For instance you can Translate the text. So if there's text you can select you can just translate that text. But if for some reason you can't select the text on the screen you can take a screenshot and then select the text this way and translate. You can also have it Speak that text or Share it in a variety of ways or just Copy it to the Clipboard and then you could paste it into a document. 

Now when you take a screenshot of something that scrolls, like a webpage in Safari, then you get the option at the top here to Capture the Screen or Full Page. It's going to give you the entire contents of the page. This works in other apps as well like, for instance, Notes. So this would be the entire screenshot. It's actually going to be saved as a pdf. The markup tools will be on by default here since you're editing a pdf not an image anymore. You can still Crop if you want and you could do all the other things like Delete it, or Share it in various ways, or Done and you can see the only option here is to save the pdf to file. But this is really handy if you see an article that you want to read and you want to Save it as an offline copy. You could use a screenshot, select full page here, and then save it out as a pdf that you can access later. 

Now I know I'm going to be asked about Screen Recording as well which is a different thing. That's taking a video of what's going on in your screen. To do that first go into Settings and then go to Control Center, and you're going to see two groups of controls. The top group is Included Controls and the bottom is More Controls. Make sure Screen Recording is at the top. If it's at the bottom, like this, then you're going to have to use the Plus button here to add it to the top. Now that it's there when you bring up Control Center, either by dragging down from the top right on newer iPhones or dragging up from the bottom on older ones, you'll see the Screen Recording button which looks like this. You tap that and it will count down, 3, 2, 1, and start recording the screen and then you can return to Control Center to stop it or tap the upper left hand corner to Stop. This will then save it as a video directly to the Photos Library. You don't have any way to markup a video like that. 

So there's a pretty complete look at taking screenshots on your iPhone or iPad. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.