Too many screenshots? Here's a shortcut that will help you manage them better




Save your screenshots to a dedicated album - the mobile spoon

This one started as a grumbling tweet after wasting my morning coffee break cleaning up over 7,500 screenshots from my iPhone photos library. 

Took me a while to realize I'm facing a real problem: 



The comments I got for the tweet and a short Google Search made me realize more people suffer from bad screenshots management on iPhones. 

It was the evidence that this is a real pain that needs to be solved once and for all!


Situation: too many screenshots

I take iPhone screenshots all the time for many reasons: 

  • Exploring products or researching competing apps 
  • When opening bugs and sending them to my team
  • Sharing funny chat moments with friends
  • Catching unique FaceTime moments
  • Funny moments taken from videos 
  • Many more... 

The result? Close to 10,000 screenshots on my iPhone... 


Problem: no easy way to clean up my screenshots

Apple made it easy to see all screenshots in a “Screenshots” album - but the album is overflowed with all kinds of screenshots, so, it’s basically impossible to "delete all" without going over all of them manually. 

Some screenshots are temporary (like bugs I already opened and shared with my team) and some are important (like FaceTime moments with my mom). 


Enter this cool little shortcut: 

How about an iOS shortcut that can be used directly from the screen capture screen, and allows you to move the recently taken screenshot to a dedicated album? 

Yeah, that’s right! 

After failing to find a proper tagging solution (photo tags exist on Mac, but there's no easy way to tag photos on iOS), I decided to go with the album's approach. 

This screenshot grabs the screenshot and moves it to a designated album: Screenshot to keep vs. temporary ones. 

This doesn't prevent them from appearing in the "recent" album (this behavior can't be changed) - but it puts those images in an album of your choice which makes it easier to delete them later. 

I created a few variants of this shortcut: 

  1. Save screenshot to... (opens a few options)
  2. Save to Temp Screenshots (always saves to this album)
  3. Save to Ideas Album (always saves to this album)


Save shortcut to a dedicated album - the mobile spoon

How to use: 

  1. Take a screenshot
  2. Click on the share button 
  3. Select 'Save to Temp Screenshots' (if you can't find it - scroll down and manage your shortcuts)
  4. See configuration popup
  5. Close shortcut (no need to save, because the shortcut already saved it) 



Comments

Gil Bouhnick The Mobile Spoon
Anonymous said…
or you could just the pager app