iPad Snipping tool for taking partial screenshots?

[venpopov]

On Mac I can press Cmd+Shift+F4 to quickly select an area of the screen and save a partial screenshot. I find this super useful when I am doing research and have a notes app open next to my source (which could be a browser window, pdf, kindle, image or whatever).

On iPad the process is much more cumbersome. The fastest way I have found is to drag from the bottom left corner. This takes a screenshot of the entire screen. I can then crop the image by dragging the four corners to the place I need them. This involves so many more clicks than it's necessary.

10 years ago I had a Samsung tablet, and it was super simple there - I could activate a snipping tool for its stylus, draw a shape on the screen and it would immediately snip that area of the screen to my clipboard and make it available for pasting somewhere. It was so much more fluent and easy to use than anything I have found for the iPad.

Is there something I am missing that can make this work? A shortcut, another app, or a setting somewhere? Ideally what I imagine is being able to assign a "snip screen area" to the squeze action of the pencil - I squeeze, regardless of what app I am in, select "snip" and draw a shape to snip from screen.

 

[chabig]

Unfortunately, neither iOS nor iPadOS have such a feature. You have to take a screenshot and crop it. The quickest way to crop requires just two opposing corners. In some cases, you might be able to pinch and zoom to get your desired content into the frame. That would be one movement.

You could also save the screenshots un-cropped while you're deep into your research, and then crop them on your Mac later.

 

[venpopov]

Thanks, I am familiar with this method. It works, but it would be much nicer to have a couple of steps less to do this especially when wanting to snip many items, it really adds up. I was hoping I was missing a feature somewhere but it seems like I need to just live with it.

I would love it if there were apps that let you customize the pencil. I know I can assign a shortcut to a squeeze action instead of the tool palette. That goes into a nice direction, but the best thing would be to be able to customize that per-app because in some apps I really want to just use the built-in tool selector.

The new pencil pro with the squeeze and double tap features could be such a versatile input device if only apple would let people build more flexible software for it or for iPadOS input device control. I would love to have something like BetterTouchTool, which is awesome on Mac, to customize actions on an iPad.