Take a Full-Page Scrolling Screenshot on iPhone

You’re three screens deep into a long Safari page, an order confirmation, a recipe, a boarding pass with terms attached, and you want the whole thing captured in one file instead of stitching together four separate screenshots by eye. iPhone has done this natively since iOS 13, it just hides behind a step almost nobody notices.

The actual steps

Take a normal screenshot first: press the side button and volume up together on Face ID iPhones, or the side button and Home button together on Touch ID models. A thumbnail appears in the lower-left corner of the screen. Tap it before it disappears.

Depending on your iOS version, this opens straight into a preview, or in iOS 26, shows the captured screenshot directly with editing tools already available. Either way, look at the top of the screen for two tabs: Screen and Full Page.

Tap Full Page, and instead of just what was visible, you get the entire scrollable content, with a smaller preview on the right you can drag to check how much got captured.

From there you can drag the crop handles to trim the top or bottom, tap the Markup pen to annotate it, and then tap the share icon or the save button. Full Page screenshots save as a PDF, worth knowing if you go looking for the file afterward in Files rather than Photos.

Where it actually works

Safari is the reliable case. This feature is built around capturing an entire scrollable web page, and it does that job well, including on pages many screens long. Mail threads, some Notes documents, and Files previews can also produce a Full Page tab, depending on whether that specific app tells iOS its content is scrollable in the right way.

Where it doesn’t

Most third-party apps, including basically every social app, Instagram, TikTok, X, Reddit, don’t expose that scrollable-content hook to the system, so you’ll only ever see the Screen tab when you screenshot inside them. There’s no setting to switch on for that.

If what you actually need is a saved copy of a page from one of those apps rather than a scroll capture, a regular screenshot per screen, or downloading the underlying content directly, is the realistic path.

What you end up with

A Full Page capture becomes a PDF sitting in Files rather than an image in your camera roll, since a page longer than one screen can’t be a single fixed-size photo.

If you wanted an image instead, you can convert one, see converting a screenshot to PDF on iPhone for that relationship the other way around.

And if the goal from the start was archiving a web article rather than screenshotting it, Safari’s own PDF export is often the cleaner route: saving a web article as a PDF on iPhone skips the screenshot step entirely and tends to produce a tidier file, no address bar or status bar baked into the page.

A couple of things that trip people up

Wait too long to tap the thumbnail and it disappears, leaving you with a plain screenshot of the visible area only; there’s no way to get Full Page mode back after that, you’d need to take a fresh screenshot.

Scrolling manually while a page is mid-load and then screenshotting won’t help either.

The Full Page capture reads from the page’s actual structure, not from what you’ve scrolled past, so a partially loaded page, spinning placeholders, lazy-loaded images that haven’t rendered, will show up incomplete or blank in those spots. Give the page a second to finish loading first.

One more: this only fires off a screenshot you’re already taking. If you jump straight to Share, or straight to Print, on a page or document, you’ll get a different capture mechanism entirely with its own rules, worth knowing if scrolling capture and PDF export start to blur together in your head.

Frequently asked questions

Does full-page screenshot work in every app on iPhone?

No. Only apps that expose scrollable content to iOS in a specific way get the Full Page tab. Safari reliably supports it. Most third-party and social apps don’t.

Why did my screenshot save as a PDF instead of a photo?

Full Page captures go into Files as a PDF because the content is taller than a single screen and can’t be represented as one fixed-size image. Regular Screen captures still save as normal photos.

What if I don’t see a Full Page tab at all?

You’re either in an app that doesn’t support it, or you tapped away from the screenshot thumbnail before the preview opened. Take the screenshot again and tap the thumbnail immediately.

Can I edit a full-page screenshot before saving it?

Yes. Drag the crop handles to trim the top or bottom, or tap the Markup pen to annotate before tapping the share or save button.

Is this the same as a screen recording?

No. A screen recording captures video of your screen over time. A full-page screenshot captures a single tall page as one static PDF.