Ryan Haines / Android Authority
The Google Pixel 9 series has been impressive on many fronts, especially in the many creative ways it uses on-device AI to improve your smartphone experience. Google is using these local smarts through a brand new app called Pixel Screenshots that elevates spontaneous screenshots from temporary and forgettable captures to searchable and actionable context cards.
I have been using the Pixel 9 Pro XL as my daily driver for the past few weeks, and after feeding the app with over 1,800 screenshots (of which only 300 got processed, but more on that later), I gotta admit I’m impressed with how functional it has made screenshots for me. That being said, there are rough edges that Google needs to smooth out, and there’s plenty of room to grow, too. So, what is the Pixel Screenshots app exactly?
C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
The Pixel Screenshots app is the quintessential answer to the question, “What if the hundreds of screenshots I take every year could actually be useful in some way?”
It is a Pixel-exclusive app that uses on-device Gemini Nano with multimodality to organize all of your screenshots and help you recall all of the information in them. Think of it as an app that puts every screenshot through an OCR process and creates a database of the embedded information, letting you ask questions around those screenshots and get answers instantly. Thanks to the app, you can take a screenshot and forget about it but still have access to its contents and the tiniest bits of data in it at a moment’s notice.
What does the Pixel Screenshots app really do?
Google says that the Pixel Screenshots app has three main functions: Save, Organize, and Recall.
Save — A brand new memory for your screenshots
When you take a screenshot on the new Pixel 9 series, it is saved to your phone’s local storage, just like on any other Android flagship.
The magic begins at this stage, as the screenshot is also fed into the Pixel Screenshots app, which automatically begins processing it. It scans through and recognizes details in the image, such as addresses, prices, contact numbers, and more, alongside other metadata, such as the app or website on which the screenshot was taken. The Screenshots app then uses AI to generate a title and summary of the information. Going a step beyond, it also suggests further actions, such as adding dates to Google Calendar or adding reminders. I was happy to see that the AI is smart enough to recommend the right time for the reminder in some cases, as you can see for the Black Friday reminder above. I no longer need to manually type dates and times when adding reminders — just screenshot them and set a reminder, done.
Organize — Manually bundle and collect similar screenshots
The Pixel Screenshots app also gives you the perfect platform to create collections of different screenshots. If you’ve ever wanted to create different folders for your screenshots without cluttering your gallery app or affecting your ability to locate something later, this is the right place to do it. I found it handy when shopping for clothing and accessories, but over time, it can also become an awesome tool for organizing book recommendations I come across online or cool tech products.
If you’re into home design, travel, food, or anything else, these collections can almost be your own local Pinterest. Plus, you can add notes to collections to add more recall value on why you created the collection.
Recall — Find anything, anytime
The bigger highlight of the Pixel Screenshots app is that it takes the information from your screenshots and makes it all searchable. You can ask questions using natural language in the search bar within the app, and the Screenshots app will present an answer from the screenshots it has processed, along with the exact capture it came from. That way, you can tap and see the entire context of that answer.
Google says you will also be able to use Gemini anywhere on your phone to help you find a saved screenshot in the future. However, this functionality isn’t live yet on my phone (or I am just doing it wrong and couldn’t get it to work).
The Pixel Screenshots experience: Changing the way you screenshot
The Pixel Screenshots app solves a key dilemma for me by adding a long-term purpose to screenshots beyond immediate sharing. The Pixel Screenshots app saves your screenshots from their short-lived fate and gives them real purpose, long-term. I am someone who takes a lot of screenshots of anything and everything mindlessly. Whether it be a meme to share with my friends that I can’t bother to save the image of, spicy gossip in the group chats, a product recommendation that I’m sharing with a relative, or something that I just want to mindlessly save just in case I need to refer to it in the future, I am quite trigger happy with my volume down and power button pushing, and I do it without as much of a second thought.
Despite relying on apps like Files by Google and Google Photos to keep things tidy, I have accumulated over 1800 screenshots. These have all been fed into the Pixel Screenshots app, but the Pixel 9 Pro XL throttles the app to process only a limited number of images every day. Because of this, I could only get about 300 images to process, and it just… stopped. I hope my entire library gets processed eventually, but for now, I haven’t been able to manually force the app to analyze the rest of my huge screenshot collection. I wish there was a button to do just that. Of the 1,800 screenshots I fed the app, only 300 got processed. The rest seems to be stuck in forgotten throttle-land. And that is the first real problem I faced with Pixel Screenshots. If you have a large collection like I do, you may not be able to import it easily into the app. Or you might want to do it in batches. For every screenshot you take after that, though, things should be more straightforward as the app immediately processes new captures when your phone is a bit idle. Throttling shouldn’t be an issue there — at least not with normal daily screenshot use.
Screenshots could soon replace your quick notes
For these 300 images, the Pixel Screenshots app gave me a sense of objective. In the few weeks of using the Pixel 9 Pro XL, I have started screenshotting more information, knowing that I can properly search it later. It’s a bit lazy in a way but very practical, too. No need to bookmark pages, take notes, save images, etc… Just trust that the Screenshots app will handle it for me.
For instance, I was reading reviews of a local movie theatre on Reddit and took a screenshot of a post and its comments. The information at hand wasn’t useful enough to make a dedicated note in my note-taking app, but it wasn’t trivial enough either to ignore completely.
When I had to recall the experience to someone, I asked the Screenshots app about the movie theatre. It instantly presented a one-line summary and the exact screenshot that I was trying to recall. This would have otherwise taken me many minutes of scrolling through random screenshots or another Google search to locate the exact Reddit post.
Pixel Screenshots app helping me locate a Reddit post speaking about a movie theatre experience
Pixel Screenshots app helping me locate the price of food I had recently spotted
Pixel Screenshots app helping me locate several monsoon alert screenshots
When I had to tell someone the flavors of ice cream roll cakes that I had recently browsed, I didn’t need to open my food delivery app and find my way to the product entry, neither did I need to go through several unrelated screenshots to get to my information. I asked Pixel Screenshots, and it surfaced the exact screenshot I was looking for without a fuss. The same played out with some monsoon alerts I had captured.
In all the other instances I’ve used the app, I liked how most of my images have been contextualized, letting me search and group together related captures. This has made trawling through hundreds of screenshots such a…