How to Take a Long Screenshot

A long screenshot is one image taller than your screen — the whole conversation, the whole article, the whole receipt, in a single picture instead of four you have to send in order.

Every device does this differently, and a few do not do it at all. Here is the method for each, starting with whichever one you are holding.

On an iPhone

Take a screenshot the usual way — side button and volume up. A small preview appears in the corner. Tap the preview, and at the top of the screen that opens you will see two tabs: Screen and Full Page.

Tap Full Page and the whole scrolling page is there, with a thumbnail strip down the right side you can drag to move through it. Tap Done, then Save PDF to Files.

Two things worth knowing before you rely on it:

• It saves a PDF, not an image. There is no option to save it to Photos as a long picture. If you need an image, you have to convert it afterwards.
• The Full Page tab does not always appear. It works in Safari and a handful of Apple apps. In most third-party apps — messaging, social, banking — there is no Full Page tab at all, and you get the visible screen only.

On an Android phone

Take a screenshot, and look at the bar that appears at the bottom. Depending on who made the phone, there will be a button labeled Capture more, Scroll capture, or an icon of two downward arrows.

Tap it and the phone scrolls the page and extends the shot. On most phones you can keep going, either by tapping repeatedly or by dragging the crop handles further down. Unlike the iPhone, the result is a normal image file.

The catch is the same one: it depends on the app cooperating. A long list in a well-behaved app scrolls happily. Some apps offer nothing, and the button simply is not there.

On a computer

This is where people get stuck, because the built-in screenshot tools on both Windows and macOS capture what is on the screen and nothing more. Snipping Tool, Shift with Command and 4, Print Screen — all of them photograph the display. None of them scrolls.

So on a computer, a long screenshot is a browser job. What is available depends entirely on which browser you are in.

Firefox has it built in

Right-click anywhere on the page, choose Take Screenshot, then Save full page. That is the whole procedure. It is the most straightforward implementation of this on any desktop browser.

Edge has it built in

Press Ctrl with Shift and S for Web capture, then choose Capture full page. You get a preview with basic drawing tools before you save.

Chrome has it, but it is hidden

There is no right-click option. The feature lives in the developer tools, which is why most people never find it:

1. Press F12, or Ctrl with Shift and I (Cmd with Option and I on a Mac)
2. Press Ctrl with Shift and P (Cmd with Shift and P on a Mac)
3. Type capture full size and press Enter

Chrome writes the whole page to a PNG in your downloads folder. It is free, it is already installed, and there is a longer walkthrough of it in our guide to capturing a whole page in Chrome.

What you do not get is any way to mark the result up, any control over what happens on a page that is unusually long, or a PDF. For a quick capture it is often enough.

When there is no method

Some things genuinely cannot be captured this way, and it is worth knowing which before you spend twenty minutes on it.

Anything that loads as you scroll and discards what you have passed. Long chat transcripts, social feeds and some very large tables work by keeping only the rows near the screen and throwing the rest away. Scroll-and-stitch cannot capture what the page has already deleted. No tool solves this, including ours.

The workaround is to print the page to PDF (Ctrl or Cmd and P, then Save as PDF) if the site supports it, or to take several ordinary screenshots and stack them.

Pages that scroll inside a panel. If the scrollbar belongs to a box on the page rather than to the window, scrolling the window does nothing and a full-page capture gets one screen. Capture the visible area instead.

Pages too long for one image. There is a height ceiling, and it is lower than people expect on a high-resolution laptop. Why that happens, and what to do.

The short version

• iPhone: screenshot, tap the preview, Full Page tab. Saves a PDF, Safari only.
• Android: screenshot, then Capture more or Scroll capture. Saves an image.
• Firefox: right-click, Take Screenshot, Save full page.
• Edge: Ctrl, Shift and S, then Capture full page.
• Chrome: developer tools, command menu, capture full size screenshot.
• Windows and macOS screenshot tools: visible screen only, no scrolling.