Then I’ve made a 2nd shortcut that removes those headers/footers/scrollbars automatically before calling the shortcut above. It works both in many apps and in all the iPhones I’ve tested.
And finally, both to show the flexibility of the first shortcut, and just for me, because I do my shortcutting in an iPad Pro 12.9", I’ve also made a shortcut specifically for the Shortcuts editor and that device:
Shortcuts Editor Screenshot Stitcher (iPad Pro 12.9″) Make the screenshots how and where you want them, and let a shortcut do the rest https://routinehub.co/shortcut/17348/
This looks incredible. I tried the Autocrop Screenshot Stitcher on my iPad running iPadOS 17.2 RC and it seems to kind of work but I’m running into problems. First, I don’t think it’s saving out to my Recents folder in Photos, which I think is the intended behavior. Second, looking at the preview that results, I’m not sure it’s stitching things together in the right order. Any tips? Thanks!
If you check the end of the shortcut, you’ll see it only saves the stitched image to Photos when it’s an image so tall that it crash Quick View (the Alert action right after saving it explains the issue). This is an iOS 17.1 bug that fortunately seems solved in 17.2 RC.
The order is the alphabetical name of the screenshots (usually IMG_#### where # is 0-9).
If you share a .zip of your (PNG!) screenshot I’ll be happy to take a look at the problem.
Thanks so much. As a trial, I took three screen shots of my Shortcuts app gallery. Here’s a capture of the preview that results. You can see that they’re mismatched.
And here is a ZIP of the three actual PNGs.
If you check the end of the shortcut, you’ll see it only saves the stitched image to Photos when it’s an image so tall that it crash Quick View (the Alert action right after saving it explains the issue).
Thanks for the clarification but I think I’m still confused as to what the intended output behavior is? Is the shortcut meant to save to a destination, or do I need to add actions to capture the output somehow?
Ah! Mystery solved. There are a few things happening:
The “Autocrop…” shortcut works with image rows (from left to right). It can’t differentiate between the sidebar and the shortcut tiles.
The shortcut tiles have very subtle gradients. The matching method used works well with flat color areas, but gradients are its kryptonite.
In the end the white between the shortcut tiles ends up being the deciding factor and that’s why you get that output.
The sidebar problem can be circumvented just by hiding it (there’s a button for it at the top left of the screen).
I have an update for the main shortcut that adds a “sensitivity” parameter, precisely for the gradient issue, but I’m waiting for the release of iOS 17.2 because it apparently solves the “long images crash shortcut” issue.
The output being saved to Photos is just a workaround for that issue. My intention is to show the output with a “Show Result” action and let the user review it before deciding what to (manually) do with it (touch the image and you’ll get access to the Share Sheet). But if you want to always save them to Photos or Files, that’s really easy to change at the end of the “Autocrop…” shortcut.
BTW, here are your screenshots stitched with “Autocrop…” with the sensitivity of the main shortcut lowered to 1
Thanks for the response @atnbueno. So if I understand correctly the shortcut isn’t necessarily going to be able to successfully stitch together grabs from any given screen, is that right? Too bad if so.
On a related note, I’m surprised that this is still such a “manual” process, or at least that there’s not a function in iOS or even a web-based service that one could call upon to do this essentially routine work. Oh well.
For what it’s worth, Picsew is an app that can do automatic stitching, and includes a pretty capable URL scheme that you can use with Shortcuts to automate your screenshot stitching, So not built-in, and not an external API (which you would likely have to pay per use for), but for a UK price it is relatively inexpensive at £1.99 to unlock all of the features, and then stitching is handled on device.
I’ve been using it for years as it was just so far ahead of the competition in the app space at the time I discovered it.
While I haven’t discovered a one-size-fits-all solution, my “Screenshot Stitcher” shortcut for PNG screenshots does the hard part. And it significantly lowers the difficulty barrier, so now anyone can do its own version for any device/app combination.
The “Autocrop…” shortcut works quite well across various iPhone apps, and I’m exploring ideas for the multipane case in iPads.
As mentioned, there are multiple apps that do stitching, but all the ones I’ve tried were missing something. Now that we have a solution where the “source code” is available, anyone can build upon it to address any specific needs or preferences.
