Easy ways to crop out the status bar when taking iOS Screenshots?

Question

Apple recommends cropping out the status bar from screenshots submitted to the app store. Doing this manually in Preview is a very tedious and error-prone process.

Do any developers have any best-practices recommendations or automated techniques for speeding up this process? The goal would be to take as input iPad and/or iPhone screenshots, and output them with the toolbar cropped off. We need to support both portrait and landscape orientation, and Retina-resolution iPhone screens.

I've found a few utilities online that purport to help with this, but the ones I have found seem to fail on Retina-display resolution screens. And another that works via the iOS Simulator requires a 1920x1080 resolution monitor to process iPad screenshots - making it useless for non-17" laptop-based developers.

Any other recommendations for taking good screenshots for the AppStore? I know (based on my searching) that there are a lot of other developers who would be interested in a quicker workflow to handle this.

Bonus points for being able to bulk-process an entire directory.

Solution 1

After much searching, the easiest tool I have found is the iOS Simulator Cropper. It does a great job of handling different resolutions and orientations, and it is painless to use. No need to muck around with Photoshop or other slow / cumbersome tools.

Link: http://www.curioustimes.de/iphonesimulatorcropper/index.html

The developer reports that they have enhanced the iOS Simulator Cropper to bulk process screenshots taken on device as well as via the Simulator. I haven't tried this yet since the update, but if it works well this will be the perfect solution.

I have also found a very useful tool in the Mac App store called "Status Barred" that also very simply crops the status bar out of any images handed to it.

Solution 2

I developed a free App, Status Barred which is on the Mac App Store. It crops your iOS screenshots from iPhone, iPad, portrait, landscape, normal & retina display.

Solution 3

I used the ImageMagick command line tools to batch crop all the Screenshot png files, but haven't figured out how to not use auto assigned output filenames.

convert Screenshot*.png -crop 640x920+0+40 920Screenshot.png

Solution 4

Here are two ways, assuming you mean status bar and not toolbar (which you probably shouldn't crop out of the screenshots).

If you have photoshop, just change the canvas size by subtracting 20 (low-res) or 40 (retina) and anchoring the bottom of the image. This works perfectly.

It's also easy in iPhoto using the Edit/Crop feature. Set the dimensions to the correct size (Portrait: 320x460 or 640x920 and Landscape: 480x300 or 960x600) and move the crop screen to the bottom of the image. This does it perfectly as well.

Solution 5

How about just using Preview? Command+A to select all, drag the selection down to 920px then Tools => Crop.

View more solutions

Comments

[BoltClock]

I think you mean the status bar.

[radven]

Great, and a step up from my current Preview based fumblings. But is there a way to bulk-process an entire directory of screenshots? Manual steps in iPhoto can still be cumbersome.

[PengOne]

Yes, in photoshop. There is a nice tutorial online: youtube.com/watch?v=rAKGiSqgbrc

[radven]

Thanks for the PhotoShop tutorial link. That is very useful. But... It doesn't help with smartly handling input files of differing orientation (portrait vs landscape) or resolution (iPhone, Retina, or iPad). Any thoughts?

[radven]

I have tried this app - it is simple and does what it says. A great tool!

[radven]

Manual draging is error prone, and gives me wrist cramps too. It is way too easy to end up with 917x or 922x. Automated tools bring much happiness and less pain. :-)

[Doug Null]

iTunes Connect does not accept files edited with this procedure.

[George Armhold]

Agree, a simple command line tool is the best approach for this kind of thing. You can automate and script it.

[Baub]

As of August 2013, this answer is still valid. :)

[Arian Faurtosh]

Someone is selling a competing app called Status Magic for $6.99, can you believe this... I almost want to buy it, and write a review pointing users to your app... Thank you @craig for making yours free!

[kmugitani]

However, iphone simulator cropper has some drawback in these days. Because newer iOS devices have quite large screen size. But iphone simulator cropper needs 100% scaling for taking itunes connect ready screenshots. It means your Mac must have larger screen than target ios devices.

[kraftydevil]

If using the simulator, make sure you use Cmd-S to save your screenshot to the desktop. I was using Cmd-Shift-4 + Space to manually take a screenshot, but that size will not be accepted by Status Barred (although it would be nice if it could tell it came form the simulator to chop off everything, including the simulator's title bar a la "iOS Simulator - iPhone 5s - iPhone 5s" etc etc

[TruMan1]

Incredible, as of 2015, this answer is still the best! Very nice app! Thx!!

[zonabi]

Truly, your app Status Barred is a Godsend. That coupled with LaunchKit has made App Store prepping SOOOOoooo much easier. Cheers to y'all.

[geekinit]

Just a heads up. For the iPhone 4.7" and 5.5" screen sizes, in other words, the iPhone 6 variants, Apple no longer allows the status bar to be cropped out. I discovered this upon uploading to iTunesConnect.

[Vinh Vo]

I made a simple command line script in NodeJS to automate this process : github.com/vovinh/remove-status-bar