Screenshot Habit Survey results

Recently, I created a survey that would collect data and qualitative responses that would help to better understand the screenshot habits of smartphone users. As the results show below, screenshots - like email - are something many people use, but it's a system that is a little broken. Instead of keeping this fascinating data to myself, I wanted to share with anyone else interested in fixing the minor issues that come with screenshots.

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Quick Takes

Out of 55 respondents...

• 100% of respondents use smartphones
• 21% of people take screenshots multiple times a day
• 45% of people take screenshots multiple times a week
• 27% of people take screenshots once in a while
• Only 5% of people take screenshots hardly ever

Screenshot Categories

When asked what they were taking screenshots of (multiple responses allowed)...

• Funny memes/images (38)
• Articles/E-Books (24)
• Receipts/Bills (22)
• Food/Receipes (22)
• Clothes/Fashion (13)
• Wishlist items (12)

In terms of what others filled in for "Other"...

• Messages/texts (4)
• Addresses (2)
• Apps for design purposes (2)
• Google Maps (as a backup)
• Work-related screenshots
• Snapchats
• Shazam songs
• Reminders of events
• Confirmation codes/tickets
• Smartphone errors

Screenshot Sources

When asked where they were taking their screenshots most (multiple responses allowed)...

• Various online articles (29)
• Email app of choice (25)
• Snapchat (24)
• Instagram (18)
• Yelp (9)
• Pocket/E-Reader (8)

In terms of what others filled in for "Other"...

• Facebook (2)
• Various apps (2)
• Messages/texts
• Reddit
• 9gag
• WeChat
• Siri
• Pinterest

Screenshot Benefits

When asked what they thought were benefits of screenshots, responses included...

• "I use screenshots to remember things, to refer things back to someone or when I need to search something."
• "Exact copy of what I need"
• "So I can dig deeper at a later point in time."
• "Quick way to share interesting things with friends"
• "Screenshots are faster than copying and pasting and screenshots already get their own folder in my phone. Screenshots are useful because they capture everything just as you see it, and it allows you to share it with others"
• "Helps you remember things and save them for later. Sort of like Pocket but for images."
• "Consistent way to share information across apps with predictable results. Text highlighting on iOS is bad, and some apps don't have share sheets for items I'd like to send elsewhere."
• "To be sent to friends / as insurance or proof of something"
• "It's closest alternative to screen sharing"
• "Mostly I use them for one of two things - 1) quickly sharing things with others from apps that don't have share features, or that have crappy share features I don't want to use, and 2) keeping track of thing I see that I'd like to later make/buy for myself."
• "Easy to copy large blocks of text, particularly formatted text"
• "Easy and most authoritative (straight from the source) way to copy and share info."
• "Easily record information without having to re-type. Easily share information with other people without having to re-type. Easily remember outfits/recipes, etc."
• "Replicating what can't be viewed on desktop"
• "Unfortunately a lot of content on the internet is now presented in images and video instead of text. A lot of interesting things and places are not labeled, and so a screenshot allows me to save things I find interesting, as well as do a reverse image lookup"
• "Quick and easy. Like a little list of things i find interesting"
• "Screenshots are an easy way to provide an reproduction of some content in an image format (e.g. sending a screenshot of a chat is easier than writing out recap yourself). This is especially useful for reference materials (e.g. a recipe) in environments with no or limited online access. On smartphones, it's usually trivial to take a screenshot, which makes it easy for me to take screenshots often without worrying about memory or time."
• "They are a fast and easy way to capture info (that may be temporarily displayed or inaccessible in the future) that you need to reference later."
• "Very quick and easy; know where the shots will be saved (photos); can access info offline; in the case of e-mail receipts/confirmations, you can see info as it was originally presented w/o formatting errors like you might get with copy and paste."
• "I screenshot mostly coupons where the cashier can scan the bar code"
• "Good summary of something using both text and image, easy to share"

Screenshot Drawbacks

When asked what they thought were drawbacks of screenshots, responses included...

• "I sometimes forget to clean them out and it looks unsightly on my photo feed on my phone"
• "No OCR capability"
• "May get lost in photo album. Also pretty weird to see random screenshots in the sea of other photos."
• "Hard to transfer a large amount of information as you're confined to screen space"
• "Doesn't display full content"
• "Screenshot hoarding is a disease. People everyday take screenshots only to enter the void of their phone, never to be seen again. They take up space and sometimes things don't need to be screenshotted. Screenshots also take articles, topics, snapchats out of context and sometime it can lead to miscommunications. PSA - don't hoard screenshots."
• "No way to annotate or leave brief notes for context."
• "Useless after using them so you gotta delete it from your phone."
• "Can't crop in real-time (like OS X drag tool). No native annotation tools. Difficult to search against (i.e. in Google Photos)."
• "It's not real time"
• "They clog up my phone's photos with stuff I often only needed temporarily but never deleted."
• "Often I want to use just once, but it stays in my camera roll. I usually like to crop to just the part I'm interested in and that can take a few steps"
• "Doesn't capture below the fold."
• "Sometimes shows too much info, doesn't highlight exactly what i want to show, need to crop out some things"
• "Hard to search/categorize/order the screenshots once they are taken, and they easily get lost in the album"
• "Cumbersome to share, uneven dimensions when viewed, not efficient way of sharing messages"
• "Unorganized (by app at best), no OCR, not searchable, no cloud storage except Google backup, no way to "link" screenshots as being related"
• "Screenshots are static, one-off, disposable things. These qualities make the organization of screenshots a problem area, especially for those who wish to archive their screenshots or are simply unconscientious about regularly deleting useless screenshots. Screenshots also lack context (e.g. What is this a screenshot of? From which app? About what? With whom?), aside from the usual timestamped filename, which further exacerbates the organization problem. On a larger scale, provenance and security are issues because they're prone to image manipulation."
• "My phone requires me to hold down the volume button and power button at the same time. Sometimes I accidentally lock my phone instead of taking a screenshot"
• "A lot of the time, they look pretty sloppy (but that's more from an aesthetics perspective). Also, if you screenshot an article to send, the receiver misses out on context."
• "I never delete them, they clog my memory on my phone"
• "Sometimes forgetting why you screenshot it in the first place."

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If you would like to learn more about where this idea came from, feel free to email me at [email protected] or submit a PR!