Screenshots, and photographs of a screen

Pages are transient by nature. An image of a page is not. Taking a picture is the single fastest way to convert something that would have disappeared into an object with a filename.

There is a good reason people do this, and it is worth saying before anything else. If an order goes wrong, the thing that decides the argument is what was on the screen at the time. A listing description, a quantity, a stated dispatch time, a message from a vendor: these are the substance of any later disagreement, and a screenshot is the obvious way to hold on to them. That is the common case and it is a reasonable one. Opening a dispute is where that record earns its keep.

The trade is straightforward. You are exchanging a page that would have been gone in an hour for a file that will be there next year, in whatever place your device puts files, which is very often a place that also syncs. The same reasoning applies to anything captured out of the market inbox.

What the image file carries

A screenshot carries the pixels, which is the obvious part, and the pixels are a faithful copy of whatever was displayed. That includes the parts you were not thinking about: the window title, the address bar, other open tabs, a notification that happened to arrive, the clock, a username in a corner, and any other window visible behind the one you meant to capture. People capture a price and hand over a desktop.

It also carries file attributes. Every file has a creation time and a modification time, recorded by the file system rather than by the image, and those are usually accurate to the second. A screenshot is therefore a timestamped record whether or not the picture shows a clock.

A photograph taken with a phone carries considerably more. Camera images commonly include an embedded metadata block, and by default that block can record the make and model of the device, the camera settings, the orientation, the exact date and time, and if location services are enabled for the camera, the coordinates where the photograph was taken. That last one is the important one. A photograph of a screen is a file that says where the person holding the phone was standing.

What metadata is, in plain terms

Metadata is a small block of labelled information stored inside the image file alongside the compressed pixels. It is not visible in the picture and it does not change how the picture looks. Most viewers will show it if you ask for the file details. It travels with the file when the file is copied, attached or uploaded, because it is part of the file rather than something added by the sender.

Some services strip parts of it when an image is uploaded, and some do not. Which is which changes over time and by service, so the safe assumption is that whatever is in the file is in the file.

What the picture does not carry

An image does not carry anything the screen did not show. If a page was scrolled, the capture holds the visible portion and not the rest. If a field was masked, it stays masked in the image. There is no hidden layer in a screenshot that recovers what was off screen.

A screenshot also does not, by itself, carry a location. Screenshots are produced by the operating system from the frame buffer, and there is no camera and no positioning involved. This is a real difference from a phone photograph, and it is the difference people most often get backwards. A screenshot of a map is not a location record. A photograph of a screen showing a map is one, because of the phone rather than the map.

And no image reports itself anywhere. A file sitting in a folder is inert. It becomes visible to another party at the moment it is sent, uploaded, or included in a backup, and that last one happens without a decision. The picture is not the exposure. Where it comes to rest is.

The last row deserves a sentence of its own. A full screen capture is a portrait of a working environment. A capture of a single window is a portrait of one window. The difference in what a later reader learns is large, and it costs nothing to choose. A later reader may simply be someone in the room, which is the screen in a shared room.

What changes the answer

5 things change how much this action gives away. None of them takes it to zero, and none of them is a promise.

1. Capture the window, not the screenMost systems can capture a single window or a dragged region. Doing so removes the tabs, the clock, the other windows and the notifications from the record. It does not remove anything inside the window you meant to keep.
2. Prefer a screenshot to a photograph of a screenIf the machine can capture its own display, that avoids the camera metadata entirely and produces a cleaner image. If the photograph is the only option, the location setting for the camera is the thing that matters. Neither choice affects what the picture shows.
3. Know where your captures landScreenshots go to a default folder, and on many systems that folder is inside a synced location or a photo library. Knowing which folder, and whether it is synced, is the difference between a local file and a remote one. See backups and sync.
4. Keep the record you actually needA dispute needs the listing terms and the message thread. It rarely needs forty images. A smaller set is a smaller record, and it is also easier to use when the moment comes. This does not make the ones you keep less durable.
5. Remember thumbnails are separate filesDeleting an image does not necessarily remove the thumbnail a gallery generated from it, because that lives in its own cache. This is described on what lands on the disk. It is a reason not to assume a single delete is complete.

What this card is not

This card explains what an image file contains and where it tends to live. It is not advice to keep or to destroy any record, and it takes no position on either.