Cydia Tweak: ClipShot Brings Advanced Screenshot Management To iOS

by Joe White

January 22, 2014

If, like me, you’re often snapping screenshots on your iDevice for one reason or another, a new jailbreak tweak called ClipShot could help keep all of your screenshots in order. Besides allowing users to have new screenshots copy over to their iDevice’s clipboard rather than save to the Photos app, ClipShot also allows jailbreakers to configure how their smartphone or tablet handles the screenshot capture process with regard to Photo Stream.

First up, however, the most obvious change made by ClipShot is a new pop up option menu that appears when users snap a screenshot on their iDevice. This menu allows users to have the captured screenshot either save to the Photos app, or copy to the clipboard, and you can enable or disable the pop-up menu outright from within the Settings app.

Here, ClipShot adds a dedicated preferences pane, where it’s also possible to have the jailbreak tweak always auto-save new screenshots to the Photos app or auto-copy them to the clipboard.

There’s the option of enabling and disabling the iOS screenshot camera flash, which some users could find annoying (for me, it’s not much of a problem), and the screenshot shutter sound - which you’ll only hear if your iPhone isn’t in Silent Mode - can be disabled, too.

More importantly, though, ClipShot also allows users to choose whether Photo Stream uploads and syncs iOS screenshots. This is significant since Apple limits the Photo Stream storage it offers iDevice users (this aside, having a bunch of iPhone and iPad screenshots synced between iDevices isn’t ideal in itself). As such, unless you’re looking to share screenshots between your all of your iDevices, we’d definitely advise ClipShot users to take advantage of this feature.

As someone who’s often snapping screenshots on an iPhone, this jailbreak tweak could help me out. Though for the time being, my current setup - which auto-syncs iOS photos to Dropbox on my Mac before separating screenshots, filing, and tagging images by date and location in the “Pictures” folder using Hazel - is definitely my preferred method. But there’s no reason why ClipShot working in conjunction with a Mac application like MyPhotostream, perhaps, wouldn’t be a great alternative.

It’s worth noting that there are a couple of bugs in ClipShot. One has effectively disabled the auto-copy to clipboard feature (at least on my iPhone 5s), and the jailbreak tweak in general is slightly on the buggy side - though this is ClipShot’s first release, and we’re expecting most of these minor problems to get fixed quickly.

If you’re looking to take control of iOS screenshots, download ClipShot. It’s available in the Cydia Store free of charge.