A few months ago we publicly released an internal tool we had developed to help us manage screenshots on the iPhone. It was called Screenshotter and offered extremely few features: It identified screenshots on your phone and let users organize them by tags. That was the extent of its functionality.
We had built it for ourselves and released it because some friends mentioned they would like to use it as well. But a lot more people than our friends ended up downloading it. It was constantly featured on tech blogs and downloaded more than 20,000 times.
Today we’re excited to release the first update to Screenshotter, which drastically enhances its usefulness. Screenshotter 2.0 includes the most requested improvements, plus lots of bug fixes and other goodies.
What’s New
Screenshotter brings features people have been clamoring for since our first release, including backup, syncing and the ability to delete screenshots from your camera roll! In addition, 2.0 has iPhone 6/6+ and iOS 8 support, and folder renaming.
Sync Between Devices (and Desktop)
Though Screenshotter 1.0 was super useful, most designers who used it asked if we could make it easier for them to transfer screenshots to the desktop. We had hoped to include this in 1.0 but ended up punting it because it was a huge amount of work.
The plan was to eventually add syncing via Dropbox, but things changed when Apple announced iCloud Drive at WWDC. Because Screenshotter is only available on iOS, their solution was the simplest thing we could offer to our users — but to use it, we had to wait until Yosemite was publicly released. Now that it’s out, we can finally offer an incredibly simple syncing solution to all Screenshotter users.
Setting it up is absurdly easy because you don’t need to do anything. Just start using Screenshotter and any screenshot you organize will sync to your iCloud account and show up nicely in iCloud Drive on your computer. If you delete it from one of those folders, it will be deleted within Screenshotter. Simple.
We might eventually add Dropbox support, but this solution is just too turnkey to ignore. We hope you enjoy it — it feels like magic to us.
Backup
Another advantage of syncing is that it acts as backup. In Screenshotter 1.0, your tags were only stored locally. If images were deleted from your phone, they’d also be deleted in Screenshotter.
In Screenshotter 2.0, when you put a screenshot in a folder, it is copied into the app’s datastore and added to iCloud. We had to rewrite the core of the app to make this possible, but it’s worth it: If you delete the screenshot from your camera roll, it will still appear in Screenshotter. This will hopefully make things a lot clearer for users.
Deleting from the Camera Roll
Screenshotter users know the annoyance of having a camera roll full of screenshots. And we all wish there were a way to get them out of there. When we released 1.0, everyone hoped that it would help clean up the camera roll, but that wasn’t an option because iOS 7 didn’t give apps access to remove images from the phone. With iOS 8, Apple added a new photos framework that makes it possible.
Now as you organize Screenshots into folders, they will be removed from the “New Screenshots” section and move into a “Move to Folders” area. Anytime you want to, just tap the “Delete” button and confirm you want them gone. Voilà, they’re history.
Note: We’d love to just delete them for you automatically as you’re organizing, but iOS 8 requires that you confirm every time a screenshot is removed — so batching seemed less annoying than asking every time you file a screenshot.
Folder Renaming
Not much to explain here. These were minor missing features in the first release. With 2.0, you can easily rename any folder from the folder list. Just hit “Edit” in the top right of the screen.
iOS 8
We made the decision to only support iOS 8 with this release. There were some major changes to permissions, iCloud and photo access in iOS 8 and that allowed us to make the app we always wanted to make. Unfortunately, these changes also broke a lot of things for Screenshotter 1.0 users. Continuing to support iOS 7 would have led to a more limited product, and since the majority of our users are early adopters, requiring iOS 8 won’t alienate too many people. For those still on iOS 7, Screenshotter 1.0 will still show up in the App Store and is still a great product.
What’s Next?
Most likely, nothing.
Remember, Screenshotter is a tool we built for ourselves and we update it rarely. Screenshotter 2.0 is a big step forward and with the exception of bugs and minor usability improvements, this is the extent of the app for now. We hope you enjoy it, and we hope you’ll give some of our other apps a try, too!
