Screenshot anything with a date
Composed extracts dated events from screenshots using Claude Vision on iPhone — flight confirmations, hotel bookings, event posters, and invite graphics all work. Screenshot a United itinerary and it pulls the airports, IATA codes, departure and arrival times, the confirmation code, and any connections into a phase-aware flight card. The rule is the same as the rest of capture: if a plan already exists as an image, never retype it.
Screenshot capture is the answer to a specific frustration — the plan that arrives already-formatted but in the wrong place. The airline emailed your itinerary; it’s a wall of text in your inbox doing nothing for your Thursday. The studio posted the recital as a graphic. Retyping any of that is exactly the friction that makes people skip capture entirely. A screenshot is one button, and the image carries every detail you’d otherwise transcribe by hand.
What screenshots work
Screenshots work when the image clearly shows a date and a thing that’s happening — the more structured the source, the cleaner the extraction. The strongest inputs are travel documents and invites: flight confirmations, hotel and Airbnb bookings, calendar invite images, and event posters or flyers. These all share a trait — a human can read the what and the when at a glance, which means Claude Vision can too.
The Sunday you got a text from the soccer coach that was just a photo of the season schedule, that’s the canonical case: a grid of dates and times you’d never type out, captured in one screenshot. Same with the hotel confirmation buried in your email from three weeks ago, or the birthday-party invite that came as a square graphic on a group thread. If you can point at the date in the image, it’s a candidate. The screenshot import feature is built for exactly these.
What the AI actually extracts
What gets extracted depends on the document, but Claude Vision reads the image the way you would and writes the fields into a real event. For a general invite or poster, that’s the title, the date, the time, and the venue — the venue gets resolved to a location so the leave-by math still works. For travel documents, it goes deeper, because the structure is richer and the stakes of getting it wrong are higher.
The honest boundary matters here: extraction is a one-time read at capture, not a live feed. Composed pulls what’s in the image at the moment you screenshot it. It does not then track the flight, watch for gate changes, or update if the airline reschedules — the details are static after creation. So the right mental model is “transcribe this document for me,” not “monitor this trip for me.” That distinction keeps your expectations matched to what the feature actually does.
Flight confirmations
Flight confirmations are the richest screenshot input, and the one where extraction earns its keep. From a single itinerary screenshot, Composed pulls the departure and arrival airports, the IATA codes, the times, the confirmation code, and any connections — and it detects whether the flight is international from the airport codes. The result is a phase-aware flight card that moves through pre-flight, check-in open, boarding, in flight, and arrived.
The detail that’s easy to miss and important to get right is timezones. The Monday you screenshotted a JFK-to-SFO booking, the arrival time on the card is San Francisco time, not New York time — because flight times resolve through the departure and arrival airports’ timezones, not your phone’s. That’s also why the five graduated flight alerts (check-in at 24 hours, a summary at 4 hours, boarding, gate close, and any layover) fire at the right local moment instead of the wrong one. The confirmation code sits on the card with a copy button so you’re not digging through email at the gate. This is flight intelligence, and screenshotting the confirmation is how you turn it on. The travel-planning workflow it fits into is covered in how to plan travel on iPhone.
Event posters and flyers
Event posters and flyers extract well because they’re designed to be read at a glance — which is the same job Claude Vision does on the image. A concert poster, a school flyer, a farmers-market graphic, a save-the-date: the title, the date, and the venue are usually the three biggest elements on the image, and that visual hierarchy is exactly what the extraction keys on.
A poster is a document a graphic designer already optimized for fast human comprehension. That optimization is what makes it easy for the AI, too — the date is big because it’s the point.
The edge case to know is the under-specified poster. A flyer that says “Saturday” with no calendar date, or “downtown” with no venue, gives the AI less to anchor to — it’ll capture what’s there and leave the ambiguous field for you to confirm. The fix is the same one-tap edit from the voice chapter: glance at the captured event, fill the gap, done. When a poster is missing the year, assume the next occurrence and check it once.
When to screenshot instead of type
Screenshot instead of type whenever the plan already exists as an image with more than two facts in it. The break-even is simple: if retyping would mean transcribing an airport code, a confirmation number, a connection, or a multi-line schedule, the screenshot wins decisively — those are the details people get wrong by hand or skip out of fatigue.
Type instead when the plan is short and lives only in your head — “lunch with Dana Friday” has nothing to screenshot. Use voice when your hands are busy and there’s no image. And reach for the screenshot the moment a document shows up: the itinerary, the booking, the invite graphic, the texted schedule.
The habit to build this week is to stop reading travel and invite emails as things to “deal with later.” When the airline confirmation or the party invite lands, screenshot it into Composed in the same ten seconds you read it. The document becomes a prepared event with a leave-by time, and the email goes back to being just an email — a record you no longer have to remember to act on.
Next: The no-typing week — a seven-day experiment to test voice and screenshot capture exclusively.