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  • Capture and email a portion of an iPad screen display?

Capture and email a portion of an iPad screen display?

April 18, 2013 / Dave Taylor / Apple iPad Help / 4 Comments

I would like to be able to clip out a rectangular section of any screen on the iPad (not just web pages) and then email that clip or send it to Evernote or whatever. I can’t find any means of doing this. Is it possible to take a screen shot on my iPad 2 but of just a subset of the screen?

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My initial response to your query was to say “no, it’s not” because the screen capture capability on the Apple iPad (actually, the entire iOS product line, including iPhones too) is basically full screen or nothing. On a Mac OS X system like an iMac, you can use Cmd-Shift-3 to take a full screen pic and Cmd-Shift-4 to be able to specify a rectangular subset of the screen as your captured image. But there’s no analog on iOS devices.
Until I thought about it a bit more and realized that you can most assuredly accomplish what you seek, there’s just a short intermediate step involved. As with many questions I see, I’m going to assume that you seek a solution to the question of “how do I email or share on Evernote a subset of what’s on my iPad screen?” rather than being obsessed with finding a screen capture utility that has that capability, which is not an option.
So what’s the secret? Cropping.
Let’s just have a look, shall we?
First off, here’s a pretty typical view of an iPad’s screen, with icons, etc:

screenshot

To take an iPad screen capture, I simultaneously press the power button on the top edge and the home button on the face of the iPad. The screen flashes white for just a moment, then there’s a new photo in the photo album that is exactly what was on screen.
With the screen captured, go into the “Photos” app and find it. It’ll look basically the same, except there’s a toolbar along the top and a ribbon along the bottom that lets you zip between photos at lightning speed:
screenshot

It’s the toolbar on top that we’re interested in. For this task, tap on “Edit” and you’ll again see the image, but this time the toolbar’s different on both the top and bottom:
screenshot

On the bottom bar there’s a button labeled Crop. That’s what you want. Tap on it…
screenshot

This is a selectable rectangle so tap and drag the corners to define the region you are interested in, like this:
screenshot

Looks good? Tap on “Crop” on the top right, then tap on “Save” in the same spot and you’ve replaced the full screen capture with the cropped subset:
screenshot

Now sending it to someone via email is a breeze. While still within the Photos app, tap on the share button (it’s the box with the arrow coming out the top):
screenshot

Facebook? Yup, got that. Twitter? Same. But you want to email it, so tap on “Mail” and you’re ready to proceed:
screenshot

That should get you going. It’s a bit clunky but with some practice I bet it’ll only add 15-20 seconds of extra time and just a few taps for you to be able to save or share cropped regions from your iPad screen grabs!

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About the Author: Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since the early days of the Internet. Author of over 20 technical books, he runs the popular AskDaveTaylor.com tech help site. You can also find his gadget reviews on YouTube and chat with him on X as @DaveTaylor.

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4 comments on “Capture and email a portion of an iPad screen display?”

  1. Alexis Erickson says:
    March 16, 2018 at 12:55 pm

    I don’t have any “crop“ option on my iPad. Sorry don’t know what version this iPad is. As usual I’ll go to my desktop and use the Ten cent snipit utility. Sigh

    Reply
  2. Kasper Østerbye says:
    April 25, 2017 at 4:15 am

    I came across this one just now, years later. What I find to be the simples way is to snapshot it on the ipad as you say above. Then in the Fotos/Pictures app, press the share button, and pick “copy”. If you have your universal clipboard enabled, you are able in preview just to say cmd-N (new from clipboard), and you have it in preview where you can pick the part you want.

    Reply
  3. Daniel says:
    September 8, 2016 at 11:30 am

    Hi
    the problem of cropping on my retina Ipad Air 2 is, that it makes the snippet much bigger than in the fullscreen screenshot.
    For me it’s useless.
    I tried with Apple’s photo tool and Adobe PS Express.

    I think the problem is the retina display. But I don’t know how to solve it.

    Daniel

    Reply
  4. Oscar says:
    April 18, 2013 at 10:29 am

    Brilliant, I didn’t even think in that solution, simple!

    Reply

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