318 Tech Journal » screencapture

Screen Shots & ARD

Charles Edge — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:36:21 +0000

For what it’s worth, we take ours from the command line. It helps keep proper track of the names screens. Simply open up a terminal window on a remote server via Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) and run the following command:

sleep 3; screencapture -iw ~/Desktop/filename.png

When you run that full string as a command you’ll have 3 seconds after hitting enter to highlight your target window, at which point your cursor will switch to the photo in window selection mode. Alternatively, you can run:

sleep 3; screencapture -iwc

Which will capture the picture to the remote machines clipboard (and can then be copied via ARD, and opened in Preview (File->new from clipboard).

Screenshots in Snow Leopard

Charles Edge — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 20:32:37 +0000

In Mac OS X 10.5 and below, the default behavior was to take screenshots (command-Shift-4) by creating a file on the desktop automatically named Picture 1.png. The second file would be created as Picture 2.png and so forth. In Snow Leopard though, the screen shots are named Screen shot followed by the date (YYYY-MM-DD) and then the time (HH.MM.SS). So if I took a screen shot at 3pm today it would be called “Screen shot 2009-08-31 at 3.01.05 PM”. This keeps them showing up in the same order they otherwise would have. At first I wasn’t sure whether I liked this change, but now I’m sure that I do. The defaults commands that were used to change the default image type and the location are still applicable.

Disable Shadows for Screen Shots

Charles Edge — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:35:15 +0000

Shadows make our screen shots look better. But we can’t always use them. There are times when we need to go ahead and disable them due to some reason or another. If you need to disable the shadows on screen captures, you can do so using the following command:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

To then enable the shadows, you would use the following command:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool false