Screenshot Studio

Your screenshots are what turn a search impression into a download. Screenshot Studio is a canvas editor built for exactly that job: you design the whole set side by side, the way the App Store gallery shows it, and export it in the pixel sizes App Store Connect asks for. If you do not have an account yet, the free editor works in the browser with no sign-up.

Starting a project

Open Screenshots and hit New project, or open a tracked app and start from there. A project started from a tracked app carries that app's icon and its synced store screenshots, so you have something real to drop into the frames straight away.

A fresh project asks you to pick a template. There are ten, from Apple-clean to bold poster styles. You can switch template at any point later: your captions, your screenshots and anything you added yourself carry over, and only the layout and styling change. Work autosaves as you go.

Picking the platform

Apple wants a separate screenshot set for each platform, so a project targets one. The picker in the top bar offers iPhone 6.9", iPad 13", Mac and Apple Watch, and it drives two things at once: the shape of the canvas you design on, and the pixel sizes the export writes.

Switching remaps the whole set rather than starting over. Captions, screenshots and layout come across, scaled to the new canvas, and the device frames swap to hardware that platform actually ships, so an iPad set gets an iPad and a Mac set gets a MacBook. Switching back returns the design exactly where it was, so it is safe to flip between platforms to compare.

The Mac canvas is the one that is a different shape rather than a different size, so templates lay themselves out differently there: captions stacked in one column, the device filling the other, sides alternating down the set. Pick a template while the project is set to Mac and you get that arrangement straight away.

Switching an existing portrait design over to Mac is deliberately gentler: it scales the layout across without rearranging it, which is what lets you switch back and get your design exactly as it was. The result is a centred column with room to spare either side. The Rearrange for this size button next to the platform picker turns it into the two-column layout in one click, and undo takes it back.

Device frames

Select a device on a slide and the inspector on the right offers eleven device families in their real finishes: iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17, iPhone Air, iPhone 16 Pro, iPad Pro 13", iPad Air 11", iPad mini, iPad, Apple Watch, MacBook and iMac. Families that match your target platform are listed first. iPads also offer a portrait or landscape toggle.

Every frame is composited from the real hardware artwork, and your screenshot sits inside the actual screen cutout. If you would rather have a plain drawn frame, the last cell in the grid switches to one, and then you can set the bezel colour yourself.

Drop a screenshot into a frame from Uploads, which lists your app's synced store screenshots alongside anything you upload. The same image can be used as a device screen, a free-floating image or the slide background, so you never upload a file twice. Your app's icon is offered there too, as a ready-made logo element with the rounded-square mask Apple uses.

Captions and elements

Double-click any text on the canvas to edit it in place. The Text section has presets for the shapes a screenshot caption actually takes: a hero headline, a subhead, an eyebrow, a big number, a quote. Seven fonts ship with the editor, so an export renders identically on any machine.

The Elements section covers the rest:

Group	What is in it
Shapes	Rectangles, cards, pills, circles, dividers, arrows
Decoration	Glows, rings, dot grids, blobs and waves for the backdrop
Annotate	Speech bubbles, a curved arrow, a marker swash, numbered pins, a tap ripple
Mockups	An iOS notification banner, a progress ring, a checklist, a row of faces, a bar chart
Social proof	Rating stars, a rating pill, badges, a user count
Icons	Over thirty vector icons

Everything is drawn on the canvas rather than pasted in as an image, so it stays sharp at export resolution and you can recolour it. Two details worth knowing: the progress ring reads its percentage out of its own label, so typing "92%" moves the arc with it, and the checklist arrives as three real text rows rather than a picture of a list, so you edit each claim in place.

Pointing at one part of a screen

A screenshot shrunk to gallery size shows the app but not the thing you want noticed. Four tools in the device inspector fix that, and all four work by drawing an area on the screenshot itself.

Cut out a fragment lifts a piece of the screen onto its own layer: pick the area, and a card of it appears over the device, ready to drag. Make it bigger than life and it reads as a magnifier; leave it at size and it reads as a card floating off the phone. Seven styles are offered, from a white plate with a soft shadow to a round lens, a sticker outline and the bare crop, plus a circle and an organic blob mask. A lens can draw a line back to where it came from and outline the spot on the device.

The cutout stays linked to the shot it came from, so replacing the screenshot in the frame updates the cutout too. Detach from source freezes the picture it is showing when you want the phone underneath to change and the card to stay.

Hide an area blurs or pixelates part of the screen. This is the one to reach for before you ship a real capture: names, e-mail addresses, avatars. It lives on the device rather than as a loose layer, so it cannot be nudged off what it covers.

Spotlight an area dims, and optionally blurs, everything except the part you choose, in a rectangle or an ellipse.

Clean status bar draws Apple's 9:41 with full signal and a full battery over the top of the screen, in dark or light ink. Nobody ships a marketing shot reading 14%. A capture taken on a real phone brings its own status bar along, so a Backdrop option covers it first: with a strip of colour matched from the screen just below, or with a soft blur of it.

One more control sits with them: Screen position slides a long screenshot up and down inside the frame, so a tall scrolling capture can show its middle or its foot without being re-cropped first.

Backgrounds

The Background section sets a colour, a gradient or an image for the whole set, with an optional dot, grid or stripe texture over it. Turn on panorama and one gradient spans every slide, each drawing its own slice, so the set reads as a single continuous scene as the gallery scrolls. Any single slide can also be given its own background.

Other languages

Apple takes a separate screenshot set for each localization, and those sets are almost always the same design with different words. Markets in the rail works that way: adding a market does not copy the project, it opens a column of captions over the layout you already have. Fix a layout once and every language has it.

Pick a market and the board previews it, so you see the German set rather than imagining it. Type translations straight onto the canvas, or work down the caption list in the panel, which shows the original wording above each box and counts how many are done. Anything left blank falls back to the design's own words, so a half-written market still exports as a usable set rather than one with holes in it.

Keywords in your captions

If the project came from one of your tracked apps, Keywords lists that app's terms, most popular first, and counts how many appear anywhere in your captions. Click one to drop it in as a caption to edit.

Worth being precise about what this does: Apple does not index screenshot text, so no caption will move your ranking. It matters for conversion. Someone who searched "habit tracker" taps the result whose first slide says "habit tracker" back to them.

Exporting

Export ZIP renders the set in the browser and downloads a ZIP with one folder per accepted size, and one folder per market above that once you have added any. An iPhone project ships 6.9-inch (1320 x 2868) and an auto-scaled 6.5-inch set (1242 x 2688); iPad ships 13-inch (2064 x 2752); Mac ships 2880 x 1800 and 1440 x 900; Apple Watch ships 410 x 502 and 416 x 496. The files are PNGs, sized exactly as App Store Connect expects, ready to upload.

Ten slides is the cap, because that is Apple's limit. Without an account the export carries a small watermark and some templates stay locked.

Getting more out of a set

• Spend your effort on the first two slides. Most people never scroll the gallery, so slides one and two do nearly all the converting.
• Write captions people recognise. Apple does not index screenshot text, so it will not change where you rank, but a first screenshot that mirrors the search someone just typed gets the tap. Pull the phrasing from your tracked keywords.
• Show the app, not a poster. The frame exists to hold a real screen. A caption over an empty frame tells a visitor nothing.

Where to go next

• Keyword research: find the phrasing your captions should echo.
• App icon generator: the other half of the tap decision.
• Rank tracking: watch what your positions do after a new set goes live.