Disable Apple Watch Screen Capture

How can I disable or modify the screen capture feature of the Apple Watch?

Although it may one day be a useful feature for me to take a screen capture of my watch, the hardware realities of the Apple Watch make this an extremely annoying implementation. It is all too easy to unknowingly and accidentally depress both the side button and digital crown at the same time.

Yes, I've tried wearing the watch higher up my wrist, and several different bands. I don't want to switch the watch's orientation because it would be at the cost of making the crown much less accessible. When I wear the watch while working out or doing physical work, I end up with a bunch of unwanted images propagating to all sorts of cloud backups, etc. I've taken to using the Screenshots album on my iPhone to mass delete, but they're already clogging my bandwidth and aforementioned storage.

Solution 1:

In watchOS 3, go to the Watch App -> General there is a toggle called Enable Screenshots that should be disabled by default (you have to scroll down a bit). When the switch is disabled, you can't take screenshot on the Watch.

Solution 2:

You cannot control this (on watchOS 2 and lower) with any setting or MDM profile. You could report feedback or a bug to Apple. Watch 3 is covered in this excellent answer.

The screen images are quite small - so yes in theory you have bandwidth being used - but it's going to be a hard case to make for Apple if you go on that as opposed to the time you lose cleaning up.

I would experiment with the crown on the other side. I have the crown on the elbow side of the face since I don't like any button presses happening by accident. I also prefer using my thumb for the digital crown as opposed to an index finger and I really don't use the other button much if at all.