The Pixel 9 helps fix one of my worst phone habits

I can’t stop taking screenshots.

Booking confirmation page? Screenshot. Important login details? Screenshot. Funny meme? Screenshot. Video or article that I could just as easily save for later instead? Screenshot.

Basically, absolutely anything that might seem remotely interesting or important on my phone, I capture ‘for future reference’.

I deliberately put that phrase in inverted commas because I almost never actually look at them again. There’s some useful information in some of them, but it’s buried so far back in my image gallery that I won’t ever find it.

This mountain of screenshots actually does more harm than good, creating unnecessary clutter that becomes increasingly difficult to organise.

Google has been regularly nudging me to deal with them for a while now via Google Photos, but its new solution is much more advanced.

A new Pixel Screenshots app, available on the Pixel 9, 9 Pro, 9 Pro XL and 9 Pro Fold, makes sense of your screenshots for you. It also analyses each one using AI, saving key details such as any locations and events mentioned.

Then, when you need specific information from one of them, you just need to ‘search in a conversational way’. In a briefing I attended, Google used the example of asking for the code to access an apartment, which the app could find in a specific screenshot and give you within seconds.

If it works as well as advertised, it would be a game-changer for me. Rather than trawling through hundreds of screenshots to find something, I could just search for what I need without the need for any technical language.

Google has also indicated that the Pixel Screenshots will be able to ‘organise’ your screenshots for you. It’s not quite clear what this will look like, but hopefully it’ll be able to use AI to sort based on the actual content of the screenshots, too.

I doubt my screenshot-happy behaviour will change anytime soon, but the Pixel Screenshots app at least means I’ll be able to extract the maximum amount of value from them.