You’ve got a long text conversation, an article, or a social media thread you want to share — but it spans five separate screenshots. iPhone’s built-in screenshot tools won’t stitch them together (the “Full Page” option only works inside a few Apple apps like Safari and Mail). Here’s how to do it in 2026.
Method 1: Use a screenshot stitching app (recommended)
The simplest, most reliable way is to use a dedicated stitching app. Stitch It is free, runs entirely on your device, and works in three taps:
- Take overlapping screenshots. Capture each section with at least 50–100 pixels of overlap between them. Overlap is what lets the app find the seam.
- Open Stitch It and import. Tap the import button, select your screenshots from your photo library, and arrange them in order.
- Tap “Stitch.” The app finds the overlap, removes the duplicate region, and gives you a single tall image.
Optional but useful steps:
- Crop the seams manually if the auto-detection got something wrong (rare).
- Redact private info — tap the redact tool to blur, pixelate, or solid-cover phone numbers, names, profile pictures, or anything else you don’t want to share.
- Export as PNG, JPG, or PDF.
This works on iPhone, iPad, and Android. It’s free with optional Pro upgrade for ad removal and extra features.
Method 2: Safari’s “Full Page” screenshot (limited)
If — and only if — the content is inside Safari (or a couple of other Apple apps like Mail, Files, and Notes), iPhone has a built-in option:
- Take a screenshot of the Safari page (Volume Up + Side button).
- Tap the screenshot preview that appears in the lower-left corner.
- Switch from “Screen” to “Full Page” at the top.
- Save as PDF, or (since iOS 17) save the long screenshot as a PNG to Photos.
Limitations: Only works inside a few Apple apps. Doesn’t work for Messages, Twitter/X, Instagram, banking apps, or anything else. Default output is a PDF. No built-in redaction.
Method 3: Manually combine in Photos or Pages (tedious)
Apple’s Pages app lets you insert multiple images on a single page and export as PDF. The result is messy — you’ll have visible seams, overlap, and inconsistent sizing — but if you have no other option:
- Open Pages, create a blank document.
- Insert each screenshot in order, one above the next.
- Manually align them by dragging.
- Export as PDF.
Skip this method if you can. It looks bad and takes 10 minutes per stitch.
How to redact names and numbers in screenshots
Most people stitching screenshots are sharing private content — text conversations, medical info, bank statements. You should redact identifying information before sharing.
Stitch It is one of the few apps that gives you all three industry-standard redaction modes in one place:
- Blur — soft, recognizable shape, harder to read but reversible in some cases (researchers have demonstrated recovery of short, format-known text like phone numbers).
- Pixelate — chunky pixels. Harder to recover than blur, but security researchers (e.g. Bishop Fox’s “Unredacter”) have shown that pixelated text can also be reversed for known fonts.
- Solid color overlay — the safest; the original pixels are gone entirely.
Use solid color overlay for anything truly sensitive — bank account numbers, medical record IDs, addresses. Use blur or pixelate for “I just want this to be unreadable at a glance” content like profile pictures.
Don’t rely on cropping alone. A solid-color overlay (#000000) is the only fully safe approach.
Pro tips
- Overlap matters. When taking screenshots to stitch later, scroll just enough that 1–2 lines of text or one UI element appears in both shots. This gives the stitcher a reliable seam.
- Consistent zoom. Don’t zoom in or out between screenshots — the app expects each section at the same scale.
- Lock orientation. Take all screenshots in the same orientation (portrait or landscape). Mixed orientations confuse the auto-stitcher.
- Save the original screenshots. If a stitch goes wrong, you’ll want the originals to retry.
The simplest answer
If you just want one app that handles all of this without thinking, install Stitch It. Free on iOS and Android, on-device privacy, redaction tools built in.
