How to Take a Screenshot on Xiaomi Mi's Phone: The Complete Guide

Xiaomi smartphones have become an integral part of our digital lives, and it often becomes necessary to capture what is happening on the screen. Whether it is an important correspondence, an instruction, a funny moment in the game or a confirmation of payment, the ability to quickly create a screenshot is a basic skill. However, the shell MIUI (or the new HyperOS) offers many ways to perform this action, which not all users know about.

In this article, we will take a look at all the available screenshot techniques for Mi, Redmi and POCO devices. You will learn not only about standard keyboard combinations, but also about hidden features such as advanced screenshot, voice control and process automation. Understanding these nuances will allow you to work with your smartphone much more efficiently and faster.

We'll also talk about saving, editing, and transmitting images, and it's often the case that a picture taken needs to be sent or saved in a particular format, and the system offers a convenient tool for doing that right at the time of creation. Let's start with the simplest and most obvious ways that work on any device.

Classical Method: A Combination of Physical Buttons

The fastest and most reliable way to do this is to run on 100% of Xiaomi smartphones, regardless of the operating system version. The mechanics are simple: you need to press the on and off buttons at the same time. The good thing about this method is that it works even in the rare cases where the touchscreen is temporarily unresponsive or the interface freezes.

It's important to press the buttons simultaneously and briefly. If you press them too long, the phone might think you want to turn off the device or call the emergency menu. It's easy enough to press them clearly. Usually, when you take a screenshot, you hear a characteristic snap of the camera shutter, and a thumbnail appears at the top of the screen.

Once the screenshot is taken, a preview pop-up appears in the upper right corner (or depending on the subject area, depending on the design topic, and you can immediately click on the edit button to make notes, or select the "Share" button to send the image to the messenger. If you do nothing, the thumbnail will disappear in a few seconds, preserved in the gallery.

⚠️ Note: On some models with very narrow screen frames (for example, the Mi 11 series or Xiaomi 13), accidentally pressing the volume button during the game can lead to an extra screenshot.

This is a universal standard for Android, so once you get used to it on Xiaomi, you can easily take screenshots on other brands. It's a basic skill that every smartphone owner should know. However, if one hand is uncomfortable using the phone, there are alternatives.

Control through notification curtain and menu

If the buttons on the body of your smartphone seem uncomfortable or one of them is faulty, you can use the software interface of the system. At the top of the screen is a notification curtain, where many useful tools are hidden, among them is a Screenshot widget, which allows you to take a picture of the current contents of the screen in one touch.

To activate this feature, you swipe from top to bottom to open the notification bar. If the desired button is not on the first page, expand the menu completely by pulling again or clicking on the corresponding icon. Find the icon with the image of the scissors or screen and click on it. The system instantly creates a picture.

The advantage of this method is that it eliminates the risk of blurring the image due to the shaking of the hands when you press the buttons, and it is ideal if you take screenshots very often and want to minimize physical effort, but there is a caveat: when the curtain opens, part of the top contents of the screen can be hidden.

For ease of use, you can add a screenshot button to a prominent place in the curtain. Go to the control panel settings, select "Edit" and drag the screenshot icon to the active area. Now it takes only a couple of seconds to take pictures, which is especially true for users with large smartphones, where reaching the volume buttons can be difficult.

Three finger gestures: speed and convenience

One of the most popular features in the MIUI shell is to take screenshots with a gesture, and by swiping three fingers down the screen, you'll get a snapshot instantly, which is probably the most ergonomic way, because it doesn't require rearranging the phone's grip and it's done with one hand.

By default, this feature can be disabled. To activate it, go to the Settings menu → Additional settings → Screenshots (or Settings → Special Features → Screenshot in new versions). You need to switch the Toggle "Three fingers" to the active position. After that, the gesture will work in all applications.

And there's an interesting continuation to this method, which is that if you do not let them go immediately with your three fingers, but hold them on the screen, you open up an extended screenshot menu, and you go right to taking a long screenshot or choosing a region, and this versatility makes gesture an indispensable tool for productive work.

It's worth noting that the gesture may not work in some secure applications, such as banking clients or incognito viewing content, and it's done for security reasons to prevent sensitive data from leaking, in which case the system will simply ignore your action.

Voice control and Google Assistant

Today's Xiaomi smartphones are very good at voice commands. If you're busy or you're far from your phone, but it's connected to the network, you can just say, "OK, Google, take a screenshot." The assistant will execute the command and save the image to the gallery.

This feature requires that the device activate Google Assistant and set up OK Google recognition. It’s also worth checking the permissions: the assistant must be given access to the screen and file system, which is usually set up automatically when it first starts, but in rare cases requires manual intervention.

This is especially useful for people with disabilities or in situations where physical interaction with the screen is difficult. Voice control in HyperOS is fast enough, although it requires a stable Internet connection to process the request on servers.

⚠️ Warning: When using a voice assistant in public places, keep privacy in mind. A loud command can draw attention to the content of your screen.

In addition to the standard assistant, in some regions and firmware, Xiao AI is available, which also knows how to take screenshots on command, but it works best on the Chinese version of firmware or when changing the region to China.

Extended screenshot: Capturing long pages

Often, you have to screen a long article, a messenger, or a list of products in an online store, and it's a long and inconvenient time to take a lot of regular screenshots and paste them together, and the Advanced Screenshot (or Long Screenshot) feature solves this problem automatically.

To use this feature, first take a regular screenshot in any convenient way. Immediately after that, a preview plaque will appear in the corner. It will have a button with a down arrow or a "Scroll" icon on it. When you click on it, you will start scrolling mode. The phone will turn the page down, taking pictures and gluing them into one long tape.

You can stop the process at any time by touching the screen, and the system will automatically crop the image at the bottom of the last visible element so that there are no seams and no empty space, and the resulting file is saved as a single high-resolution image.

It is important to understand that not all applications support automatic scrolling. In some cases, the system may scroll through the page but not make a quality seam, or stop altogether if the content is dynamic (for example, an endless news feed that loads as you scroll).

Configure format, quality and folder of saving

By default, all screenshots are saved in high quality JPG format. However, if you want maximum lossless detail (for example, for text screenshots or graphs), you can change the format to PNG. This will increase the file size, but retain the clarity of each pixel.

To change your settings, go to the Gallery app, search for Screenshots, click three dots in the corner, and select Settings. Here you can choose your preferred format. Also, in this menu, you can often see a path to the folder where the files are saved.

The standard way to screenshots in the Android file system is as follows: Internal memory → DCIM → Screenshots or internal memory → Pictures → By knowing this path, you can easily find the desired image through the file manager and transfer it to your computer through the file manager. USB-cable.

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Save password screenshots only in PNG format and delete them immediately after use, as artifacts can be artifacts in JPG format when compressed strongly, but PNG guarantees the readability of small code characters.

Remember to periodically clean the folder with screenshots. They tend to accumulate and take up gigabytes of memory, especially if you often take long photos of pages. In the settings of the phone's storage, you can find a recommendation for cleaning duplicates and old files.

Frequent problems and their solution

Sometimes, users are faced with screenshots being stopped or saved by a black screen, most often due to content protection, such as Netflix, YouTube Premium or banking applications (Sberbank Online, Tinkoff), screenshots are blocked at the DRM security level.

If you try to take a screenshot in an app like this, the system will either give you a "Can't Screenshot" notification or it will save a black rectangle, and you can't get around it with standard tools, and third-party apps are also powerless without root rights, which are not recommended for the average user.

Another problem is a lack of free memory: if the internal storage is full, the phone will not be able to physically save the new file, in which case you need to free up at least 50-100 MB of space, and the cause may be a crowded gallery cache, which is treated by clearing the cache in the application settings.

⚠️ Warning: If screenshots are no longer taken in all applications at once, including the desktop, try restarting the device.

In rare cases, the problem lies in the damage of system files after a failed update. If the reboot does not help, you can try resetting the interface settings or, in extreme cases, perform a full reset to factory settings, saving important data beforehand.

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Most screenshot problems on Xiaomi are solved by checking free memory or restarting your smartphone, and the black screen in apps is a standard data protection.

Questions and Answers (FAQ)