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Safari website screenshot creates PDF on iCloud Drive downloads folder

E

emulajavi

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 15, 2011
360
1,013
Hi.

on my iPad with iPadOS 15

when I’m browsing a website using Safari and do a screenshot with the vol+ and power button.… a screenshot is taken BUT… also a PDF of the full website from top to bottom is generated and saved into the Downloads folder on iCloud Drive.

I don’t find any setting to disable this behavior.… so the PDF isn’t generated and saved

can anyone help me?

thank you!
 
I know there is a way to get the behavior you're seeing, but I don't know why it's happening automatically.

When you take a screenshot and quickly click on the image on the lower left of the screen, you can then work on the "Full Page" and save it to files (with the default location being the last folder used).

Could you have an extension installed in Safari which is causing this?
 
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I don’t have any extensions installed and I also don’t have any ’experimental features’ changed from default in Settings.


It’s very strange because it happens randomly on my iPhone and on my iPad so when I try to reproduce the behavior I’m not able to do it, but from time to time when I look into the downloads folder on iCloud Drive, I find a bunch of websites saved there as pdf, and all I can say is that they are websites I’ve ‘screenshoted‘ recently either to save a picture on the camera roll or share a picture of part of it (touching on the bottom left thumbnail, cropping the picture, touching on share, sharing the picture via WhatsApp and then touching the red recycle bin so to no save the picture in the camera roll).
 
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I've read that the full page screenshots are supported in Mail as well as Safari; they both support taking a screenshot of the scrollable page outside of what's visible on the screen. Could you test in Mail and see if the same thing happens?

It's not so great that it's random; makes it hard to test.
 
This is a very weird Safari iPad bug.

You can see this bug in action by taking these steps:

1. Launch Safari on your iPad (I’m running iPadOS 15.6.1).
2. Go to a website, and take a screenshot of the website.
3. Tap on the screenshot in the corner to view it.
4. Tap on the “Done” button and choose “Save To Photos”.

Steps #3 and #4 are required to trigger this bug.

BUG: A copy of the screenshot in PDF format will appear in your iCloud Downloads folder.
 
Unable to reproduce. Checked downloads folder in Web iCloud files immediately after the pictures were uploaded and nothing there.
 
I’ve had this on my iPhone for at least two years and thought it was standard behavior. Had gigabytes of PDFs in my iCloud Drive that I had to delete. Can’t find a way to disable it either.
 
scotty321 said:
This is a very weird Safari iPad bug.

You can see this bug in action by taking these steps:

1. Launch Safari on your iPad (I’m running iPadOS 15.6.1).
2. Go to a website, and take a screenshot of the website.
3. Tap on the screenshot in the corner to view it.
4. Tap on the “Done” button and choose “Save To Photos”.

Steps #3 and #4 are required to trigger this bug.

BUG: A copy of the screenshot in PDF format will appear in your iCloud Downloads folder.
Click to expand...
Just tried it and….yep! PDF in downloads folder! Weird bug. IPad Pro 2017…iOS 15.7 (19H12)
 
I just noticed this today. Also does it for Mail on iOS, although we can’t reproduce that reliably. Confirmed for my wife as well.

PDFs go back to 2019 for us.

Seems like a security concern.
 
I’ve seen this annoying behavior on my iPhone as well.

Take a screenshot of a webpage. Select the small image to open the editor. Select screen. Select done. Select save to photos. The screenshot appears in photos and the full page pdf appears in files.

It doesn’t happen every time. Not sure what triggers it to happen.
 
Thanks for the steps.

It’s very strange because it happens randomly, and we don’t know what triggers it.


scotty321 said:
This is a very weird Safari iPad bug.

You can see this bug in action by taking these steps:

1. Launch Safari on your iPad (I’m running iPadOS 15.6.1).
2. Go to a website, and take a screenshot of the website.
3. Tap on the screenshot in the corner to view it.
4. Tap on the “Done” button and choose “Save To Photos”.

Steps #3 and #4 are required to trigger this bug.

BUG: A copy of the screenshot in PDF format will appear in your iCloud Downloads folder.
Click to expand...
 
I just registered this account so I could say that this issue has been plaguing me for years. I have never turned this on anywhere and have no idea when or how it decides to stash 25MB files in my iCloud storage — which, if you don’t catch this issue, really eats up your iCloud storage space. Which makes you buy more iCloud storage space.

Just wanted to point that out in a class action hinty kind of way…

Actually, just looked closer and saw/noticed the following for the first time LOL. But it doesn’t seem to matter whether you select SCREEN or FULL PAGE, it’ll save the screenshot in Photos and sometimes save the full page PDF in Files. Weird.

IMG_7619.jpeg
 
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It’s even worse on my end. For me, no matter which download location outside of folders in iCloud I select, it always get resets to said folder. I am literally unable to save anything to "On My iPhone". I have even tried downloading straight to Dropbox, but who could’ve guessed it, my selected location get reset instantly and downloads everything to iCloud Drive/Downloads. This is so infuriating, especially since i am on the latest build, iOS 17.2.1 (21C66).

Edit
Submitted my issue directly to Apple via feedback assistant (13535803).
 
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Just discovered it's happening on my devices and has since 2021!!

It happens on any web browser, not just Safari. Confirmed it happens with Chrome and DuckDuckGo. Also happens in the Notes app.
 
June 2024 an it still randomly happens...

I've seen it has also started to happen with Notes App screenshot. As always, randomly.
 
Interesting twist on this issue. I saved some safari webpage screenshots directly into files and discovered that copies were also in the recently deleted album in photos.
 
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xbpr said:
Interesting twist on this issue. I saved some safari webpage screenshots directly into files and discovered that copies were also in the recently deleted album in photos.
Click to expand...

I think that's the normal behavior and what I would expect. When I take a screenshot it automatically goes to Photos until I finish deciding what to do with it. When I then save it to Files, the screenshot is deleted from Photos. Deleted photos go into the recently deleted album.
 
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I just discovered this this morning while looking at my iCloud Drive’s Downloads folder on a reimaged MacBook Air. Very disturbing and I thought perhaps my iPhone was compromised.

I noticed similar to what others have posted, seemingly random instances of Safari full webpage renderings saved as PDFs, same with Mail sometimes. In my case I have both with the addition of outputs from ChatGPT. The only metadata that is common to all this in the PDFs is Quartz PDFContext, sometimes with the author identified as Safari or Mail, sometimes no author.

The last time it occurred was 1/1 just a few days ago. For me the files span five years going back to February 2020.

This spans multiple iOS versions and three different iPhones. The only thing suspect is I had a Safari extension for iVerify Basic that I have since uninstalled the app (and extension).

Extremely bizarre and concerning security issue.
 
I also joined just to hop on and say this happens to me too. This is the first time I've seen a step-by-step guide to what causes it (not just taking a screenshot, but opening it up from the little corner preview and then clicking save to photos).

I discovered something that might be helpful: when I tried the steps and immediately opened Files, I saw a document labeled with the name of the website I'd screenshotted—generic/unknown file type, not a PDF, was unable to open it or rename it. A few second later, it vanished. Couldn't find it anywhere in Files. Tried it a second time, same result.

Maybe when a screenshot is taken and the screenshot editor is opened, the system preps a copy of the file in both Photos AND Files, and then once you select whether to save to Photos or Files it deletes the other one? And sometimes it rooks up and forgets to delete the copy in Files, thus causing the unwanted PDFs? Seems a bass-ackwards way to code it, but it's the best thing I can think of.
 
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