Taking Screenshots and What Happens Next
Turn on Gesture overlay, give a swipe a job, and a screenshot is one drag away from wherever you are - saved quietly, opened for editing, translated or sent on, exactly the way you set it up.
Why You'll Love This
A confirmation code, a boarding pass, a joke in a group chat - some things on your screen are worth keeping exactly as they look right now. FastMediaSorter turns a single swipe at the screen edge into a screenshot, and can immediately do something useful with it: open it for editing, translate the text on it, or send it on - without you opening the app first.
Screen capture is not a separate program you launch. It rides on the same edge gesture system used for quick photos and app shortcuts, so once it is set up, it works from inside any app.
- FastMediaSorter in the Standard or noLegal edition. Screen capture is not part of the Lite, Photos, Legacy, VR or FOSS editions.
- The Display over other apps permission, so the gesture strip can sit on top of whatever you are looking at.
- Android's own on-screen confirmation before a capture - on Standard, before every one; on noLegal, only until you turn on the accessibility shortcut described below.
Turn on the gesture and give it a job
Open Settings, the Management tab, and turn on Gesture overlay - "Show up to 4 thin gesture strips at the screen edges, over other apps." Tap Configure gestures to open the edge-gesture window, pick a band and a direction, and set its Gesture action to one of the screenshot options below. The bands, the directions, and everything else you can assign to them are covered in full in Screen-edge gestures and the quick-access panel.
Settings, Management tab, Gesture overlay section expanded.
Swipe to capture
Perform the swipe on the band you assigned - a short drag from a corner band that FastMediaSorter reads as Up, Right or Down, wherever exactly it started. The first time, a one-time notice explains what is about to happen - "Screen capture needs your permission": "The app can capture the current device screen, including other apps, only after you confirm the Android system prompt.." Tap Continue, then confirm Android's own screen-capture prompt. This is the same Play-safe capture flow behind every screenshot action on this page; on Standard, that Android prompt appears before every single shot, since there is no way around it in a Play-published app.
Choose what happens to the shot
The action you assigned to that gesture decides what happens the moment the screenshot is saved:
- Silent screenshot - just saves it, nothing else.
- Screenshot - view - opens it in the player.
- Screenshot for editing - opens it in the drawing editor, ready to circle or write on.
- Screenshot - OCR translation - reads the text on the screen and translates it; see Extracting text with offline OCR and Translating extracted text.
- Screenshot - send to.. - opens the Send To sheet with the shot already attached; see Sharing files to nearby devices and apps.
- Screenshot - share - hands it to the Android system share sheet.
- Crop screenshot and share - reopens the shot with a draggable crop frame, overwrites it with the cropped result, then opens Send To for the cropped picture.
Each of the four edge bands has its own Up, Right and Down slot, so different corners can run different actions - a quiet save on one, an editable copy on another.
Edge-gesture window, Gesture action dialog open over a direction row, screenshot options visible.
Skip the dialog every time (noLegal)
On Standard, Android asks you to confirm every single shot - a Play-published app cannot remove that step. The noLegal edition offers a second path on Android 11 and newer: an accessibility service that saves screenshots silently, with nothing to confirm each time. The first time you turn on Gesture overlay, a dialog titled "Enable screen gestures" offers Open settings to turn it on. If you would rather not, or your phone will not allow it, tap Old method to fall back to the same per-shot confirmation Standard uses - which is also what noLegal itself falls back to automatically on Android 8, 9 and 10, since the accessibility route needs Android 11 or newer.
Enable screen gestures dialog, Open settings and Old method buttons visible.
Choose where screenshots are saved
By default a screenshot lands in the phone's screenshots folder, or Downloads if that is not available. Open Configure gestures, expand General gesture settings, and use Save screenshots to.. to pick a resource instead - a network folder or a cloud folder works too. If that place cannot be reached at the moment a shot is taken, it falls back through Pictures/Screenshots, then DCIM/Screenshots, then Downloads, so a screenshot is never lost, only redirected.
Turn on Save screenshots to clipboard in the same group and every screenshot is also copied to the clipboard the instant it is saved, ready to paste into a chat - on top of whatever the gesture action already does with it.
Edge-gesture window, General gesture settings group expanded.
What You Get
One swipe at the edge of the screen captures whatever is in front of you, on Standard with Android's own quick confirmation and on noLegal silently once you turn that on - and lands exactly where you told it to: open for editing, translated, on its way to someone, or just quietly saved.
Tips and Troubleshooting
- Different corners, different jobs. Assign a quiet Silent screenshot to one band and Screenshot for editing to another, so a plain capture and an annotated one are two different swipes.
- A copy on the clipboard is not a backup. It holds only the last screenshot; the saved file in your chosen place is the one that stays. The same idea applies to photos in Taking photos, videos and voice notes straight into a folder.
- Nothing happens when you swipe? Check that direction is not set to Do not use, and that Display over other apps is still granted - Android sometimes revokes it after a while.