Screen Grab with InstantShot

December 24, 2007

InstantShot! offers classical screenshot functionality for capturing the whole screen, a portion of it or a window and also the option to make timed screenshots or to make delayed captures over time. It offers a wide range of preferences and options to fit everyone’s needs.

InstantShot! creates an icon in the menu bar. Clicking on the icon, a menu will appear. Select the capture type from the menu (whole screen, a portion of screen, timed screenshot or multiple captures) or, if you want to change the save format, select the desired one from the submenus and then… capture!

Simply select from the menu the option “Shoot inside a rect” or directly the format you want to save to from the submenu. Click on the screen and drag the mouse to cover the area you want to screenshot. While you’re dragging, a tooltip will always show the size of the portion of the screen you’re going to capture. Simple, isn’t it?

If you want to later modify the rectangle, keep Shift pressed while releasing the mouse in the initial selection or enable the option “Always modify rectangles” in the preferences: resize the rectangle from its angles or drag it around; when you are ready, double click inside the rectangle to capture the contents. If you need a rectangle of a precise size, you can press a number on your keyoboard to get a rectangle of a predefined or custom size.

You can grab the picture of an application window, choose “Shoot inside a rect” and you’ll be able to choose a window on screen if you’ve enabled Universal Access’ services OR the alternate method from the InstantShot!’s preferences’ panel. Notice that only with the Universal Access’ services enabled the chosen window will be brought in front! Also notice that the alternate method is to be considered experimental and is discouraged as it could stop working on future releases of Mac OSX.

If you choose to enable Universal Access, you can choose either “first–class” windows (application windows, the dock…) or “control” windows (toolbars, document windows, single icons in the dock…). You can choose which one to pick in the preferences or pressing Option/Alt while selecting a window.

InstantShot! is highly customizable. For example you can choose:

the hotkeys for the most common functions;

the path to save the captures to;

the distinguishing prefix for the saved images;

the compression level for the Jpg format;

whether a sound should be played after a capture;

if the mouse pointer should be included in the screenshots;

the delay for a single timed capture or multiple captures;

whether you want to confirm the filename for each saved image;

scaling and constraining options for the saved images;

whether to add a fixed border to the chosen rectangles;

if InstantShot! should automatically start after login;

if it should immediately start shooting multiple captures