Chrome 91 adds built-in screenshot tool on Android and it is awesome

We’ve been tracking the addition of a new share sheet in Chrome and the addition of the included, built-in screenshot tool for some time. While it has taken quite a bit of time to arrive here in Chrome 91, it is no less welcome and no less awesome for it. Rolling out widely for all users, this new feature at first seemed a bit unnecessary and repetitive given the fact that nearly all Android phones already have a baked-in screenshot tool. However, after playing with it for a few minutes, I can say that this is a worthy add-on and one I think Google was smart to employ.

First up, let’s cover how and where you’ll see this new feature. On any page on the web, you can click the share button in your 3-dot overflow menu up top, select share, and from the custom Chrome share sheet, you can now see and select the brand-new screenshot button. You can see what I’m talking about below in the first screenshot. I went ahead and added in a few other screenshots (ironically taken on my phone’s screenshot tool since, well, you get it) that we’ll chat a bit about after you take a look.

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A host of useful tools are included

As you can see from the images above, once you click the screenshot button, you are met with a nice collection of tools to edit and mark up your new screenshot. You can select multiple colors of both text and drawing tools, adjust pen thickness, text size, text alignment, and even quickly copy your text with a dedicated button. Undo tools are there where you’d expect and the whole UI just works the way you need it to in a post-screenshot tool. Of course, there’s the ability to crop the whole image down as well.

Is this doing anything your phone already can’t? Depending on the model of phone you have, perhaps. But more importantly, this screenshot tool will now be a Chrome-specific feature that will be on any phone running Google Chrome from here on out. Some phones still don’t have great screenshot tools and some do, but this tool will be the exact same experience across all of them for web content. Instead of getting a new phone and wondering exactly what the company that made it will do with your screenshot experience, Google has made a single experience that will work on any device, regardless of maker, carrier or Android version. That’s the beauty of Chrome.

Additonally, this feature is simply a faster way to share web content versus most built-in screenshot tools. Instead of a button combo, searching for the screenshot, sharing from whatever app you open the screenshot it, this new feature makes it dead-simple to grab content from the web, mark it up, and send it out without leaving Chrome. I was even able to leverage it from the Twitter PWA via the built-in, Twitter-specific share button in that app. The Chrome share sheet popped up, I grabbed the screenshot, and shared where I needed.

Overall, I’ve quickly gone from “why is this even a thing?” to absolutely loving this new feature. I think it is a smart inclusion and since they’ve done such a nice job with the screenshot tool on Chrome OS, it makes sense that they’re continuing that work on Chrome for Android. There’s no doubt I’ll be using this quite often in lieu of my phone’s built-in screenshot tool from now on, and I think many of you might as well.