How can I silence the screenshot camera sound?

The sound effects for screenshots can be really annoying and loud at certain times. How can I turn this off? It makes the noise even when my volume is all the way down?

Update: I want to simply silence the sound effect, without any other side effects. Turning on the phone's vibration mode means it will make noise when something causes it to vibrate, so this defeats the purpose.

Solution 1:

To my knowledge, there technically is not a way to specifically and only disable the camera shutter sound for screenshots, but there are still solutions to stop it from making the sound:

One thing you can do is flip the mute toggle switch on the side of your device to be muted (silent/vibrate). You will see a Ringer Silent icon on the screen and may feel a vibration on an iPhone. After that, there will be no noise from the screenshot (among other things).

On an iPhone, if you don't wan't to get the vibration when turning the phone to silent, or if you want to leave it on silent without getting vibrations, you can go to Settings > Sound and toggle "Vibrate on Silent" off. Then it won't vibrate or make any noise. However, you also won't hear any notification sounds or vibrations at all, so you run the risk of missing some alerts. So in this case what you may want to do is flip the mute toggle to silent right before taking a screenshot (and it won't make any noise from vibration), and then after the screenshot flip it back to normal.

Another alternative, if you don't mind the camera shutter sound but just want it quieter, is that in Settings > Sounds you can slide Ringer and Alerts to minimum. It'll still make sounds, just quietly. But again you run the risk of missing your phone ringing in some situations as it'll be quiet.

Edit: I noticed that on iOS 10.3, when you toggle the mute switch while the camera is open, it does not make any vibration. So you could just toggle it to mute before you take the picture, and then toggle back to normal when you're done.

Solution 2:

In some ways this answer I'm about to give is a horrible kludge, but it's quick and somewhat effective. Kal-al's answer (please up-vote it!) may be more useful to some people, but it appears that Apple has given us no way to electronically silence the camera shutter sound effect. The software offers no interface to independently do this, without some side effect of silencing something else.

Therefore, the simplest and quickest way I've found is a low-tech and utterly physical solution: to put your thumb over the speaker on the right side of the base of your phone. If you have a case on your phone it will be less effective. If you have no case it will do a fairly good job muffling any sound coming out of the speaker. Whether it's quiet enough for you depends on your situation. Perhaps if this is combined with some aspects of Kal-al's answer, you might be able to make the sound negligible.