Framed iPhone screenshots
March 16, 2025 at 7:56 AM by Dr. Drang
After reading Jason Snell’s review of Shareshot and Framous, I thought I should start adding frames to my iPhone screenshots again, something I haven’t done for several years. But I didn’t buy either of the apps he reviewed, nor did I download Federico Viticci’s Apple Frames Shortcut. Unsurprisingly, I built my own little system specifically tuned to the way I work using Retrobatch and Keyboard Maestro.
We’ll start with the Retrobatch part. There are two workflows that I’ve saved as droplets to my Applications folder: and . One creates full-sized images (1320×2720) and the other creates half-sized images (660×1360) from the screenshots I take with my iPhone 16 Pro.
Each workflow uses a transparent PNG image for my Natural Titanium phone, which I downloaded from Apple’s Product Bezels page. Because I thought Apple added a little too much empty space around the frame, I sliced 15 pixels from the left and right sides of Apple’s image and 20 pixels from the top and bottom. This affects a couple of values used in the workflows.
Here’s the workflow for . The workflow looks the same, except it doesn’t include the action.
Here are the properties of all the actions:
If you want to make your own Retrobatch workflows using the Apple’s original PNG, you’ll have to add 15 and 20 to the X and Y offsets in the Overlay action.
The radius I used for the action, 180 pixels, doesn’t match the inside radius of the frame perfectly, nor does it have to. It just has make the rounded corners of the screenshot fit under the frame and not “peek out” beyond its outer edges.
If you don’t want to build your Retrobatch workflows from scratch you can download the workflow, adjust it to your needs, and save it as a droplet. Retrobatch workflows are XML files, so clicking the download link may open the file in your browser. If that happens, just come back here and right-click on the link to save it to your computer. You may have to delete an .xml extension from the downloaded file. “Smart” software often does things we don’t want.
So now we have droplets we can drag iPhone screenshots onto to get framed images like the one at the top of the post. But no one wants their Applications folder open all the time, so I built a Keyboard Maestro macro to do what dragging would do. You can download it or build it yourself from this:
Here’s how I use it. After taking the screenshots on my iPhone, I open the Photos app on my Mac and copy the screenshot images to whatever folder I’m using for the assets of the blog post I’m writing. I then select the screenshots I want framed and press ⌃⌥⌘F. This window appears:
I select or , as appropriate,
A couple of notes:
- You may need to tweak the Keyboard Maestro macro. It’s set to open the selected image files in the droplets on my computer. That should work on your computer if you gave the droplets the same names and saved them in the Applications folder, but I don’t trust computers to do what they should. If the macro doesn’t work for you, try resetting the apps in the “with” portion of the actions.
- I have no interest in generalizing any of this work. I want the frames to reflect my iPhone, not any iPhone, so I only use the Natural Titanium frame. Also, I don’t remember ever taking a screenshot when my iPhone was in landscape mode, so the screenshot is assumed to be portrait. If I needed a general tool, I would have bought Shareshot or Framous.
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I think I’ll probably change the default to Half, but we’ll see how it goes. ↩