How to Remove the Scroll Bar from a Long Screenshot on iPhone

What it looks like

A thin grey line, or a row of short dashes at different heights, runs down the right edge of the long image. In dark mode it’s light grey. In a long screenshot made from a screen recording, the bar can be there along the whole length.

It’s easy to miss on the phone and very visible once the image is printed, shared or zoomed in. In a tutorial, a long receipt or a page of notes, it looks like a mark on the paper.

Why it happens

The bar is the iPhone’s scroll indicator. iOS shows it whenever a page scrolls and fades it out a moment after you stop. Take a screenshot right after scrolling, and it’s in the picture.

A long screenshot made from several screenshots catches it almost every time, because you scroll, capture, scroll again and capture again. And since the indicator moves down as you scroll, it lands at a different height in each screenshot, which is where the row of dashes comes from. A screen recording catches it the whole time you scroll.

iOS has no setting that hides the scroll indicator, and Safari’s Full Page option only works in some apps. Waiting a second after every scroll works, but it’s slow and easy to forget halfway down a long page.

How to remove it with Zeta Stitch

1. 1Step 1:Stitch your screenshots or recording

   Select your screenshots in Zeta and tap Long Stitch, or turn a screen recording into a long screenshot with Scrollshot. Either way, the result opens in the editor.

   

2. 2Step 2:Tap Clean Up and turn on Scroll Bar

   Tap Clean Up in the editor’s toolbar and turn on Scroll Bar. Zeta looks for the bar in every screenshot and shows Cleaned when it’s done, or No scroll bar detected if there was none to remove.

   

3. 3Step 3:Check the right edge, then save

   Zoom in along the right edge to check that the dashes are gone. While you’re in Clean Up, you can tidy the status bar too. Tap the check mark to save the long image to Photos.

   

4. 4Step 4:Make it automatic

   In Settings > Images and Export, turn on Auto-Clean Scroll Bar. Long screenshots made with Long Stitch or from screen recordings are then cleaned as soon as the editor opens. For V Stitch and H Stitch, tap Clean Up yourself.

   

How to avoid it next time

• Turn on Auto-Clean Scroll Bar. It’s the simplest way: every long screenshot made with Long Stitch or Scrollshot comes out clean without an extra tap.
• Pause briefly after scrolling. If you take screenshots by hand, waiting until the bar has faded before each one keeps it out of the picture in the first place.
• Clean the status bar at the same time. Auto-Clean Status Bar replaces it with a clean one (full signal and battery, same time), crops it off or erases it, so the top of the image looks as tidy as the edge.
• Check before you delete the originals. Zoom in on the right edge of the result before you let Zeta delete the screenshots it was made from.

For the basics of making a long screenshot, see how to screenshot a whole web page and how to turn a screen recording into a long screenshot.