Web application development agency

Stop Producing Screenshots With Text

If you’re still sending textual information as screenshots (or worse—photos of screens) to colleagues or friends, I urge you to stop. Text has clear advantages over images:

Why Text Is Better

Text is far easier to manipulate. With text, you can:

• Search through it.
• Copy-paste for notes, calculations, or comparisons.
• Save and analyze later.
• Forward partially or in full.
• Parse with automation tools.
• Avoid retyping—everything is already in digital form.

None of this is possible with images.

Other drawbacks of screenshots:

• Many platforms compress or resize images, degrading quality. It’s not uncommon to get small blurry images where you can’t really see anything.
• Text uses far less storage and computing resources.
• Images are files—while copy-pasting graphics is becoming more common, text works universally.

This it just unprofessional. When I ask a car shop for a quote (or my dentist, as it was the case that motivated me to write this) and they send me scanned documents, to me they start looking as if they sent me a million dollar contract written in Comic Sans—extremely unprofessional.

Common Excuses

“I am using a phone!”

The fact of using a mobile phone does indeed place some limitation when it comes to scrolling and selecting multiple text sections, but it doesn’t make it impossible with some effort and I think that applying some effort is justified. Unless you’re using a native app which at least on Android can either have copy-paste feature unimplemented or deliberately denied entirely. But then you should stop using such apps and switch to text-compatible alternatives, such as web site or another app that enables working with text properly. You almost always can copy the text either by selecting small text sections one by one or tap “select all”. Yes, sometimes, indeed, formatting may suck greatly, especially when copying from complex web sites, but the benefits obtained by having text version of your invaluable information instead of images outweighs possible minor cosmetic imperfections introduced during copy-pasting.

“I wanted to show you a big picture!”

A big picture can definitely be helpful for a reader, but only when it accompanies a text version. If you have drawn some arrows or highlighted differences between some things on your screenshot for better comprehension — that’s fine, but be sure to enable a reader to manipulate the text once the big picture is clear.

“It’s technically impossible!”

Some companies will tell me that is it technically impossible for them to send originals. This sounds silly to me. Especially when it comes to scanned documents, since in order to scan you need to have some form of electronic document to print first. I don’t trust companies and their employees who say “we can’t and that’s it”. Maybe some day a car mechanic will tell me that there is no technical possibility to put the brake pad back or a dentist will tell me that it’s technically impossible to manufacture a tooth implant based on the 3d model they made a week before. Many things are possible when you make an effort and many are not when you don’t.

What to Do Instead

• Keep it simple and always keep text as text! Aggressively avoid screenshots whenever possible—and yes, that includes photos of screens (which, sadly, still happens).

• Need to refer to some particular section of text? Just copy it and insert with the quote formatting. Don’t make a screenshot of the highlighted text!

• Reporting a bug? Copy all the information you consider useful for debugging as text and include a screenshot if you think it will be beneficial to developers to understand the big picture or you are referring to some UI blocks.

• If you think you can’t entirely avoid screenshots (or decide to ignore what has been said above), at least include a text version in addition to your graphical masterpiece. You will do a great favor.

• No less important: If you’re referencing information from a web page, always include a link to the original source.

Conclusion

Today, many built-in apps have OCR capabilities, so you can probably circumvent the issues caused by lame people sending you tons of screenshots or scans. But to me, it feels like a workaround for a problem that should not exist in the first place.

Stay texty!