App Store Screenshot Localization: How to Translate Your Screenshots

Someone browsing the Spanish App Store sees a Spanish interface: Spanish buttons, Spanish category names, Spanish reviews. If your screenshots are the only English thing on the page, they read as English — and as an app that wasn't built with that user in mind.

This post covers how App Store Connect actually stores localized screenshots, what filling those slots by hand costs, and how to translate a screenshot set without redoing the design once per language.

How App Store Connect Stores Localized Screenshots

Screenshots are attached to a localization, not to the app. Add Spanish (Spain) to your listing and you get a fresh, independent set of screenshot slots for it — the same device sizes as your primary language, each with its own uploads.

The rest of the rules are unchanged per localization: same accepted formats, same exact pixel dimensions, and the same ceiling of 10 screenshots per device size per localization. The full list is in App Store Connect Screenshot Requirements.

The important part is structural: those slots exist whether or not you fill them. If you only ever produce one screenshot set, that is the set every market gets.

Why the English Set Underperforms Elsewhere

You don't need a study to see the problem — it's visible on the page:

• Context mismatch. Everything around your screenshots is translated. Your screenshots aren't. The mismatch is the first signal a user gets about how much of the app is meant for them.
• The headline is the pitch. Screenshot headlines are usually where you explain what the app does. In the App Store, that text is doing the selling before anyone taps through — and a user who doesn't read English fluently just skips it.
• The first screenshots are shown in search. The first 1–3 screenshots appear in search results depending on device, so the untranslated ones are the ones doing the most work.

That's the whole argument, and it doesn't need a percentage attached to it.

What Doing It by Hand Costs

The manual version isn't hard, it's just multiplicative. For each language you have to:

1. Copy your slide layouts
2. Replace the headline and subtitle with translated copy
3. Re-export every slide, at every device size you support
4. Keep all of it in sync the next time you reword a headline

The export count is slides × device sizes × languages. Five slides at two device sizes is 10 files in English; add four languages and it's 50. Step 4 is the one that actually hurts — change one headline six months later and you're back through every language to keep them consistent.

What Gets Translated (And What Doesn't)

Worth being precise, because this is where localization tools differ:

Translated: the headline and subtitle you write on each slide — the marketing text layered around the phone frame.

Not translated: the pixels inside the app screenshot you upload. That image is passed through untouched. If your app's own UI shows English inside the frame, it stays English.

If you want the UI inside the frame localized too, that's a job for your app: switch the simulator to the target language, capture a fresh screenshot, and upload that one as the slide's image.

Doing It in One Export

App Store Screenshot Maker is built around the structure above. The workflow:

Step 1: Build your slides once Upload your app screenshot, write the headline and subtitle, pick a background. Same as the normal flow — see How to Make App Store Screenshots Without Photoshop if you haven't done this part yet.

Step 2: Pick your languages Select the locales you want. The headline and subtitle on every selected slide get translated.

Step 3: Export One export produces a full, correctly-sized screenshot set for each language.

When you export more than one language, the ZIP has a top-level folder per language — base/ for your original copy, then the App Store Connect locale code for each translation (es-ES/, de-DE/, and so on). Inside each of those is the usual folder per device size. So es-ES/ maps directly onto the Spanish (Spain) localization's screenshot slots, at the dimensions listed in the App Store screenshot size guide.

This works the same for Play Store sizes as for App Store sizes.

Supported Languages

Seven, named by App Store Connect locale code so the folder names match what you select in App Store Connect:

Japanese, Korean, and Chinese are not supported yet — those scripts need a bundled webfont that hasn't shipped, and rendering them without it would produce broken screenshots rather than translated ones.

One Thing to Check Before You Upload

Translated copy changes length. German and Russian in particular tend to run longer than the English you wrote, and a headline that fits on one line in English can wrap to three. Look at each locale's slides before uploading and shorten the English source if a translation is overflowing — editing the original once is faster than fixing seven exports.

What It Costs

Translation is part of the $5 one-time purchase. There's no per-language fee and no subscription — the same $5 that removes the watermark covers localization. Paid accounts get 10 translate runs per day.

If you're signed in but haven't paid, you get one free run to see the output quality first: one slide into one language, once per account.

Summary

• App Store Connect keeps a separate screenshot set per localization, up to 10 per device size
• Those slots exist whether you fill them or not — an unfilled localization means every market sees the set you built for one
• By hand, the work multiplies by slides × device sizes × languages, and has to be redone whenever copy changes
• What gets translated is your headline and subtitle, not the contents of your uploaded screenshot
• Screenshot Maker translates into 7 languages and exports one ready-to-upload folder per locale code, included in the $5 one-time price