Android is fixing the most annoying part of taking scrolling screenshots

When you want to share something on your screen but don’t want to — or can’t — get a link to the content, you can just take a screenshot. If what you’re trying to capture is too long to fit on screen, you can take a scrolling screenshot to capture more than what the display shows. Scrolling screenshots are a relatively new addition to Android, introduced back in Android 12. Since then, Google has barely touched the feature, but it’s finally preparing a small but welcome quality-of-life improvement.

Despite its name, Android’s scrolling screenshot feature doesn’t actually scroll the screen to capture a long image. Instead, the system asks apps to provide the image data for content hidden off-screen. Android’s approach yields better results than the scroll-and-stitch method used by other implementations, but it’s less versatile because it only works on apps built on UI frameworks recognized by the system (Views, WebViews). This is why Android’s scrolling screenshot feature doesn’t work in every app and why many OEMs still use their own versions.

Although Google isn’t making any changes to how scrolling screenshots actually work, the company is changing what happens after you save them. Currently, when you take a scrolling screenshot, Android saves both the original and the long screenshot to the Screenshots folder. If you don’t go back and delete that original image, it just clutters up your storage. A lot of people probably have duplicate screenshots littering their galleries, but this will soon be a thing of the past.

In the latest 2512 Android Canary release, Android now automatically deletes the original screenshot after you save a scrolling version. This happens when you tap the big “Save” button in the top left corner of the scrolling screenshot UI or the “Share” button in the top right. If you hit “Cancel,” Android preserves the original screenshot.

This is a really small change in the grand scheme of things, but I’m sure anyone who frequently takes scrolling screenshots will appreciate it. Since most of you aren’t running Canary builds, you’ll have to wait for this feature to trickle down into the Beta and Stable release channels. The earliest we might see it outside of the Canary channel is in the upcoming Android 16 QPR3 beta, which should go live soon ahead of the stable release next March.