How to take a screenshot on your Pixel Watch

There’s no denying the fact that when you have personal electronics on your person, there are going to be times that you need to capture the screen you are looking at in order to share it with someone. With phones, this is not just a common occurrence: it is a regular, everyday practice for most of us. Over the past few years, screenshot tools have become far more pervasive and far more capable, with arguably the best overall experience being on a Chromebook at this point.

But what about your watch? Since these on-wrist devices tend to be mirrors of our phones, there’s less reason most users need to snag a screenshot of that display on most days. As a matter of fact, there’s only been a few times up until now that I even considered it with the Pixel Watch, but it was in those moments that I decided to look it up and, yes, you can definitely take a screenshot of whatever is currently on the face of your Pixel Watch when needed.

For me, that particular moment was a time when I needed to show off my daily steps to my 8-year-old son who always destroys me in this metric. To be fair, his smaller legs require him to take 5 steps to my 4, but he’s also wildly more active than I am. This adds up to him blowing me out of the water most days on steps taken, so when I have a big day, I like to see if I can pull off the win. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I love that I can send the result over to him in a photo form, too. Here’s how to do it.

Open up the Watch app to begin

First, this isn’t an action you can perform on your Pixel Watch alone. Instead, it requires you to use the Watch app to get things done. As a matter of fact, none of this process actually involves anything on the watch itself. All you need to do is get the Pixel Watch on the screen you want to capture, get the Watch app pulled up on your phone, hit the 3-dot menu up top, and select “Take screen shot on watch.”

Screenshot appears in the notification area

After you do this step, you’ll see a notification appear that says “Ready to send watch screenshot” up in your notifications tray. Click on this notification to bring up a screen that has all sorts of options to share your newly-captured screenshot.

I’d recommend going with the Google Photos upload option as it will keep your new screenshot around for you to use later; but clicking into WhatsApp, Messages or Discord does exactly what you’d expect as well. The screenshot will show up in the messages app of your choosing and by simply hitting the send button after this sharing process is complete, you will deliver your screenshot to the intended recipient.

Again, I don’t know how frequently you’ll use this quick tutorial, but it could come in handy here and there, and now that you know that doing it is as simple as this, you may actually get some use out of the feature on a more-regular basis. If you’d like to be notified of future guides and how-to’s down the road, be sure to get subscribed to our newsletter that can be found in the sidebar for desktop users and just beneath this content if you are on mobile!