Bump. Please can we get acknowledgement of this issue? It is still happening.

Valve, please can you look into this? I've done some more research as it has been driving me crazy, and it turns out this is due to "steamwebhelper.exe" potentially maxing out a CPU core when a screenshot is taken.

Please look at the following album with multiple sources of evidence regarding this:
https://imgur.com/a/rx6AesX

I am not sure why this is the case, but a simple screenshot should NOT be maxing out a CPU core, with each keypress. This definitely sounds like a bug to me.

There's definitely some kind of bug going on here, as games I have recently played and taken screenshots in show up as "You haven't taken any screenshots yet" despite there being a post-game summary contradicting that as seen here[i.imgur.com] which is rather strange.

It may be unrelated, but keep in mind I have over 40,000+ screenshots (80,000+ if we include the thumbnails Steam automatically generates), while I feel it should be very unlikely the issue is caused by that since it should only be taking a screenshot that has minimal impact on system resources, if it is somehow trying to cache/update a database of that size...

Another bug, possibly related:
Recordings & Screenshots Page Missing Majority Of Games/Screenshots

Just to add to this after doing some more investigation, I feel Steam is not optimised to handle many screenshots at once. Deleting 20 screenshots takes less than a second on a test machine that has no screenshots. Deleting the same amount of screenshots on my system (mind you steam is on an NVME SSD) takes over a minute...

I believe the issue is with the indexing, Steam keeps track of each individual file and its associated metadata in the screenshots.vdf file under \Steam\userdata\*\760. My folder currently contains over 129,000 files and is over 41GB[i.imgur.com] in size.

That file is a whopping 25MB, with 1,047,053 lines of data. That's over 1 million! I'm no expert on the matter, but trying to process that much information surely has a performance impact? And given the fact that when a screenshot is taken it needs to add that metadata to that file... Here is what is typically added, for each screenshot taken;

Update and a breakthrough! It is INDEED Steam's inability to handle such a large amount of data! Moving the screenshots out of the folder from under \Steam\userdata\*\760 and deleting the screenshots.vdf in that folder brought back the original performance, albeit there are still games that cause a slight stutter (3 FPS drop) each time a screenshot is taken.

Look at this example of Baldur's Gate 3, with an otherwise perfect frametime at a capped 60 FPS that doesn't even come close to stressing my system, yet when a screenshot is taken you can visibly see (bottom right FPS indicator) my FPS drops by ~3 FPS each time a screenshot is taken (notification bottom left): https://imgur.com/OqCWNXk

The Steam screenshot feature definitely needs some work, because as it stands it already degrades performance on a high-end machine, and only seems to get worse as more and more screenshots get registered in the screenshots.vdf file. A solution to this would be rather simple, as Steam user Dexter pointed out;

Originally posted by Dexter:

A likely more permanent solution to this would be if Steam changed how it handled Screenshots and for instance didn't add new Screenshots immediately to the .vdf file when they are taken, but in the background after a gaming session is over.

Can someone at Valve PLEASE acknowledge this outstanding issue dating back to 2013?

Here's a list of matching threads I have found with other users describing the same issue that I am facing. Steam support is unable to assist as they have "been unable to reproduce these issues here and we're not receiving a widespread report of this from other users." yet I feel that is simply a matter of people not taking the time to report it and just dealing with it (I know I have for years now until it brought some games to a standstill).

28 December (2013)
Taking screenshots now causes games to stutter?

22 September (2018)
Lag when taking screenshots.

10 October (2018)
Steam Game Lags When Take New Screenshot ?

1 December (2019)
Steam freezes games when taking screenshots

11 November (2020)
Lag after taking a screenshot

22 February (2021)
Game is lagging when I take a screenshots.

3 July (2023)
Taking Screenshots makes games lag/stutter for up to a second if you have a lot

29 February (2024)
Is anyone experiencing lag whilst taking screenshots?

1 March (2024)
Lag when taking screenshots

18 April (2024)
PC freezes for few seconds on taking screenshot

Update: This was fixed!! The beautiful soul(s) at Valve resolved this issue in the January 14th beta update and I can confirm that with my 40,000+ screenshots I no longer experience the devastating stutter!

I would have loved to hear what the issue was and how they resolved this, as right now it still updates the screenshots.vdf file when a screenshot is taken, but the proof is in the pudding! I do still experience a 3-5 FPS drop in games like Baldur's Gate 3, even when I have no screenshots and an empty screenshots.vdf, but I feel this is an unrelated problem and most likely an issue with the game, as I get zero FPS drops in the other games I used to get major stuttering in.

THANK YOU, honestly, to whoever fixed this, you're my hero. As someone who loves to document their adventures, you have blessed my thousands of future hours in games without the excruciating lag that would honestly put me off even wanting to take screenshots for memories.

Now if only we can fix Steam Screenshots: Steam Overwriting "Taken" Date With "Posted" Date then we have a perfect screenshot system!

I don't speak English, I'm using a translator. I'm currently in the Steam beta, but I'm still experiencing stuttering every time I take a screenshot. Do you know anything about this?