1863: "Screenshots"

[Soupspoon]

Title Text: For the final exam, you take a screenshot showing all the work you've done in class, and it has to survive beibg uploaded, thumbnailed, and rescreenshotted through a train of social kedia sites.

It's actually a very good straight lesson, the one presented here! But the prerequisites for a pass, and the failed sales model, are indeed off on a tangent of absurdity...

[richP]

Timely. I recently had to screenshot something for a customer. I re-cropped the screenshot to show that the smiling woman from the ad below the menubar (screenshot was from a free program that nags you to buy the full version) was *not* from a NSFW tab.

snipping tool FTW.

[sonar1313]

Apparently Professor Munroe is OK with setting aside his rules of subconscious satisfaction for the good of the class....

https://xkcd.com/1271/

[speising]

I know some business contacts i'd like to send this.
(missing: image in word document as email attachment, why not to do it.)

[SuicideJunkie]

I know some business contacts i'd like to send this.
(missing: image in word document as email attachment, why not to do it.)

We've got some legacy documentation here that I got in an email with attached PDF containing images scanned in from paper, of a lightly used photocopy of a document created with a typewriter that may or may not have been the actual original.

On a side note, I don't understand why people are willing to spend so much money on screenshot tools.
The company I work for is on the extreme side and even paid for a physical tool; all our workstations have their own dedicated screenshot key.

[Heimhenge]

I had to laugh at bullet 6 because I once wasted close to 30 minutes trying to catch one frame of a gif but kept missing it. And it wasn't a particularly fast frame rate. I read somewhere the delay between hitting the print-screen key and the actual capture was anywhere from 0.5-1 s, but it seemed to take longer ... probably dependent on the OS and how much else is running but I don't know for sure. Then it dawned on me to just DL the gif, skip through it frame by frame in PhotoPaint, and save it as an individual image. Duh.

[Steve the Pocket]

Just a few hours ago I discovered how to take an iPad screenshot by accident. GOOMHR

[ManaUser]

On a side note, I don't understand why people are willing to spend so much money on screenshot tools.
The company I work for is on the extreme side and even paid for a physical tool; all our workstations have their own dedicated screenshot key.

I take it your workplace uses Macs or something? PCs have a physical screenshot key standard. (Or at least a physical key which can logically be assigned that purpose and comes configured that way under Windows.)

[Soupspoon]

I read that as "some solution was bought despite a physical screenshot key"...

There's one situation in which a 'solution' would be useful. Multiple (not necessary rapid-fire!) uses of the PrtScr button (or other macro-key-combo), straight to timestamped image files, to be dealt with later. Rather than 'merely' clicking it to clipboard, then paste into image editor of choice after Alt-Tabbing away, (optional editing, there and then,) and saving, then Alt-Tabbing back, at each stage. Or other local system equivalents.

For some processes, the ability to maintain consistency (and not overwriting text cut'n'paste data/etc, or the screenshot data with text) might find a software one-click automated solution to be useful. And I've written programs of my own to do that (in everything from Pascal to Perl!), when an interesting need arose. I suppose someone managed to make their own solutions commercial (though have had the good sense never to approach me and suggest that they have the answer to the problem I never knew I had, and can I please give them $$$s for the pleasure), and perhaps some people have been willing to source that kind of thing for themselves (though I regret I've never been there when they demanded they give me £££s for my own bespoke solutions).

Anyway, I suppose it all goes to show. And, regardless of implementation or surrounding pecuniary settlements, eventually someone has to think about following guidelines very similar to those in the comic, because (preset shaving of extraneous window title-bars aside) there's a limit to the automation process...

[Copper Bezel]

I love how screenshots work on Windows with Dropbox installed. Just takes the shot, saves the image to a Screenshots folder in the Dropbox one, and puts up a notification. Had to set up a script to get the same behavior with the screenshot tool in GNOME (although, to be fair, at least it allows for that.)

[Soupspoon]

I nearly mentioned this. Dropbox was used on a computer I helped maintain (at least until Dropbox decided to just stop supporting the platform it was on, for reasons I never found out) and the unannounced activation of screenshot capture/save behaviour was of some concern once it was discovered.

(If you want it, brilliant. But it was not a feature looked for in that situation. It was not a totally undocumented feature, but it wasn't prominently displayed as something worth going into the options to turn off, and may or may not have only crept in long after the initial install, without any obvious fanfare and option to never turn it on.)

ETA: Not sure, now, whether the concern was that:
A) screenshots were being saved "in the raw" across the Dropbox system (with an unknown, but at times shown to be deficient, degree of security to keep them and their privileged contents safe from determined prying eyes),
B) That by arbitrarily adding files both bandwidth and free capacity were being eaten up (without deliberate effort by the user) or
C) That by being saved-to-file it was actually preventing the normal paste-buffer-straight-into-graphics-program process (I have a feeling this might have happened, and trying to work out why led us to discover the Dropbox functionality suddenly active, but it was a while ago and I may misremember)...


Also Gnome (plus KDE, and most of the other WMs) have quite extensive configurable auto-screenshot capabilities. On hot-key-combo press? Yes. Every five seconds? Yup. Named window/active window/window-under-cursor/whole-screen? All of the above. To (sequential/timestamped) file? If you want that. But you have to tell the system to do that. (Or let someone else tell the system to do that, with sufficient rights, and you can always check the native capability for tampering.) Remember to practice safe hex at all times!

[Copper Bezel]

Well, by default, GNOME just spams the files into your Pictures folder.

I'm 99.8% certain I remember clicking something on setting up Dropbox's capture method. If not, well, it is at least superior to whatever the fuck Windows does. Using the clipboard shouldn't even be an option, it's idiotic.

Edit: I also question the extent to which GNOME qualifies as configurable in this regard. There's no option to change the save folder. I had to use a script to invoke the screenshot command and give it a save path. And while I was there, use notify-send to throw up a notification, because.

[ucim]

Using the clipboard shouldn't even be an option, it's idiotic.

No it's not. Sometimes I want a screenshot to view to compare with another screen, and don't want it to be saved to disk. Copy to clipboard, open in graphics program, and when I close the program, the screenshot is gone as if it never was.

Jose

[Copper Bezel]

Take the screenshot

Open the file

Delete the file

This is not hard

[ucim]

No, it's not "hard". It's also not convenient, and computers are supposed to make life convenient. Also it's not secure - the file still remains on the hard drive. This is especially true if the drive is a flash drive.

Jose

[Copper Bezel]

It's not what you're attenuated to. It is fewer and less arcane steps than all of that nonsense with your image editor, which you've been trained into by bad design and time. It is objectively, inherently, fundamentally more convenient.

Edit: And cry me a security river if people are freely accessing deleted files in your user directory.

Edit a second time: The only way this pastebuffer nonsense can even in the theoretical case be more "convenient" than using the damn file system to contain the damn file is if you are more familiar with the arcana of MS Paint than the basic functions of the fucking file manager, in which case software design has failed you utterly.

Edit a third time: I'm not really angry at you, I'm angry at the people who hurt you, but don't advocate this insanity further and pass on their cycle of abuse to others.

[Soupspoon]

Regardless of anything else, there are a number of things about Dropbox's apparent default behaviour that I don't like... *shudder*

(And that was the problem. Rather than the expected image to copypasta, it turned out to be a text link... Except it originally wasn't linked to Ctrl-(Alt-)PrintScreen, just straight (Alt-)PrintScreen..)

[orthogon]

It's not what you're attenuated to. It is fewer and less arcane steps than all of that nonsense with your image editor, which you've been trained into by bad design and time. It is objectively, inherently, fundamentally more convenient.

The file system, though, is a pretty rubbish way of doing lots of things. In this case it's like asking a colleague for a copy of something, and them putting the copy somewhere in your filing cabinet instead of handing it to you or putting it in your in-tray. You have to go looking for the thing that somebody just this minute made for you. If a colleague did that, you'd be quite annoyed.

Looking for things in the file system is by far the biggest time waster in using Windows, despite continual introduction of new features: search, recently used, libraries, etc. Partly it's that these features are buggy (search is slow or inexplicably blind to certain locations; recently used lists seem to get added to only when you load, not when you save...), and partly it's that the dynamic nature means that you don't know where (if anywhere) the thing you want is going to appear each time, so ironically you have to do a manual search of the results. Maybe gnome does it better, but for me Linux is the very definition of "you just have to know where this goes in the file system [in this release]".

So it seems that there's something missing in the whole desktop metaphor, the idea that something you just used, saved or produced should be right there in your hand. The copy buffer is the closest we get to that, but in my view it needs to be extended - you need to have a super-accessible pair (or more) of virtual hands.

richP mentioned the Snipping Tool, which is a step in the right direction, in that the screenshot appears in the window straight away, then you can decide what to do with it.

[Copper Bezel]

Regardless of anything else, there are a number of things about Dropbox's apparent default behaviour that I don't like... *shudder*

(And that was the problem. Rather than the expected image to copypasta, it turned out to be a text link... Except it originally wasn't linked to Ctrl-(Alt-)PrintScreen, just straight (Alt-)PrintScreen..)

What? No, the Ctrl+PrintScreen behavior described is both useless and not current, as public links don't work that way in Dropbox anymore and why the fuck would you want to spam your clipboard anyway. It's the basic PrintScreen functionality I'm talking about. Pictured at the top of the page is in fact the opt in window that asks you if you want Dropbox to take over managing screenshots because Windows is terrible at it, confirming that there is in fact nothing about this behavior that is "default"; anyone complaining clicked through that window without reading it.

Looking for things in the file system is by far the biggest time waster in using Windows, despite continual introduction of new features: search, recently used, libraries, etc. Partly it's that these features are buggy (search is slow or inexplicably blind to certain locations; recently used lists seem to get added to only when you load, not when you save...), and partly it's that the dynamic nature means that you don't know where (if anywhere) the thing you want is going to appear each time, so ironically you have to do a manual search of the results. Maybe gnome does it better, but for me Linux is the very definition of "you just have to know where this goes in the file system [in this release]".

In the proposed screenshot workflow, all of this is irrelevant, because it still requires opening up MS Paint and Ctrl+Ving into the darkness, and the screenshot folder would be a known and easy to get to location (in the case of Windows with Dropbox, Dropbox / Screenshots.)

Windows Explorer is an awful file manager, but it does the very basics. I can understand why it might drive Windows users to be scared of the filesystem.

In GNOME, you would indeed need to know at least where your file was, or a part of the name (since typing any random thing into the file manager instantly searches recursively for matches.) There isn't a "Libraries" function to let you know where your suggested, related, and top-rated files are and which files are trending this week. (Unless you count the "recents" category, which opens instantly like everything else but isn't populated by actions from all apps and is therefore useless.)

So it seems that there's something missing in the whole desktop metaphor, the idea that something you just used, saved or produced should be right there in your hand.

It's called the notification area. GNOME's ahead of Windows in chasing Android on this front, but only by a little, Windows apps are doing good things on this front.

The copy buffer is the closest we get to that, but in my view it needs to be extended - you need to have a super-accessible pair (or more) of virtual hands.

It's called a clipboard manager.

It is possible that the pastebuffer method here was at one time meant to solve a problem that existed in the system that inflicted it on the world. If the clipboard somehow enabled you to view and save the screenshot from wherever without loading anything, it'd actually begin to solve the perceived problem in a sense, too, instead of creating more of them. But that problem does not presently exist and appropriate solutions do if it did. See Android, where taking a screenshot puts a link to the file in your notification tray. I don't remember whether Windows / Dropbox does this, too.

And between this and password managers, I'm sick to death of things fucking with the clipboard. Things like this are the reason why people don't use clipboard managers. Because there's always something fucking with the clipboard instead of letting it be a goddamn clipboard.

[Soupspoon]

What? No, the Ctrl+PrintScreen behavior described is both useless and not current, as public links don't work that way in Dropbox anymore

Demonstrative of the problem, if they've changed it, they've discovered that people don't like it.

and why the fuck would you want to spam your clipboard anyway.

Apparently, some people like putting things in clipboards. As if the clipboard buffer is useful or something, and so why this useless feature is still hogging potential resources.

Pictured at the top of the page is in fact the opt in window that asks you if you want Dropbox to take over managing screenshots

Maybe they changed it, when they discovered people don't like it.

because Windows is terrible at it,

Obviously it's not a useful feature at all, and shouldn't be allowed to hog up potemtial resources.

anyone complaining clicked through that window without reading it.

Because that's exactly how every feature of every piece of software gets presented to the user, all the time. The developer considerately allowing (indeed requiring!) the user to confirm (or else veto by omission) each and every functional hook.

See Android, where taking a screenshot puts a link to the file in your notification tray.

That's pretty much a necessity, given the absence of any form of Ctrl-V anywhere outside the horrible on-screen keyboard (that I'm using right now, under the duress of necessity, the bluetooth keyboard being still in another bag). You just don't get (nor apparently expect, even with the off-screen keyboard) the option to paste.

Android has a number of oddnesses, that may be tied to the OS or to the apps...

Spoiler:

I use "Image Cropper Free" (does what it says on the tin, in all respects, many other image-croppers existed when I sought out one, but I chose this one and then learnt how to wrangle it). When opened, it has a button to open an image (because "last thing I screenshot, whether as a memory fragment or as the file Android gave me for pressing these two physical tablet buttons with just the right amount of simultaneous time delay" is not an option) and immediately it presents me with the option of Complete Action Using either "Gallery" or "Photos" (because I tend not to confirm such things as "Always", instead clicking "Just [this] Once", much as I untick the "Always use the selected program to open this type of file" box in Windows's "Open with..." dialogue, even though it's easier to de-edit the default in future). If I choose "Photos" it often goes all weird (sometimes Image Cropper crashes), so perhaps I should select Gallery as the Always option.

Choosing the Gallery, I now have options of Camera, Download, Documents, Cropped Images (seemingly created by this app), Spectrum Analysis (created by another app) and Sculpt+ (created by an app I removed shortly after originally trying). ((Except that the second time I go in there, just now, suddenly "sdcard0" appears at the start and shifts over every other item, despite never being there before... This is a new discovery and not part of my originally intended rant!)) It doesn't include Screenshots, and there's no way to actually navigate the (actual, or effectively virtual) file structure, so I need to separately use the natively installed Android file manager (or any chosen "better than the default" App chosen from the online store based upon vicarious reviews and publisher's claims) to copy/move the image to somewhere that the Gallery does see.

Anyway, eventually I select the image, somehow, and then it appears in the App. I think. Because the next step is to tap the image and get a Complete Action Using choice of opening with "Crop Photo" or "Crop Picture" (below which ia the unused Always and the always used Just Once), each of which takes me to a different photo-cropping interface... Despite my impression that I was already opening the image in Image Cropper Free, and I've no idea which of the "Crop ..." options this is (if, indeed, it is either?), and that I was only using Gallery to identify the file to operate upon.

Then... Well, trial and error, because Crop Photo and Crop Picture work differently and sometimes I try one and start again to use the other because something is easier to do using the one I didn't choose, whichever it was that I hadn't. And the saving process is just one of those differences. The vertical-ellipses in the top right of the App that is the local representation of the Burger Icon might or might not work to give me various options, or a short press on the thing I long-press for App-switching.

Maybe I need a new(er) Image Cropper. Or maybe a different generation/vendor-implementation of Android. This may be my fourth or fifth Android tablet, and they have all worked sufficiently different from each other to make me wonder exactly how little underlying functionality is part of the core system and how much is the choice of Lenovo, Acer, Samsung, Alcatel, etc.
..

(And I've never used a Password Manager... Always some distrust as to where I'd be if the Manager went wrong, and mostly in the "completely loses all my passwords" sense rather than the "broadcasts them to all curious parties" way. Surprised to hear they use clipboard so openly, as a TSR clipboard-logger would easilily enough listen out for passwords, as well as amything else you send through there. Thought it's be a more sophisticated mechanism.)

[Copper Bezel]

1, I use my clipboard a hell of a lot more than I think a lot of people do, because there are people who don't even use a fucking clipboard manager. Quite probably a majority of people. Benighted drifters all. In any case, the fact that I use it is why I don't want irrelevant features fucking it up.

2, I see no evidence that Dropbox ever changed anything, because both the documentation and the software as I have it do the thing I described. If they changed something, um, yay, they are capable of updating and improving their software. I find it entirely unlikely that there was a stage at which the opt-in screenshot capture feature was not presented as such.

3, If you don't read the prompts, you can't complain. 99.9% of users do neither. As a person (like me) in that .1% apt to complain, you are obliged to read the prompts. If you want your software to behave in a very particular way and don't want to have to work around it instead, you have to take the time to figure out what you're "Yes, that sounds fantastic"ing.

4, Android works with keyboards, too. There is no Ctrl+V outside of text boxes when not using one because Ctrl+V is for fucking text when you're in a text-oriented app. Clipboards handle formatted text, text containing images, a section of an image in an image editor, a glob of 2D or 3D vertices or cps, sure, but those are snippets of documents and not whole documents in themselves, because that is what copy and paste does. You can copy and paste files in a file manager, where they are not presently being treated as documents. These are all consistent applications of what the clipboard does and largely interoperable. Where the non-text variations of these concepts are available in a given app, there is indeed a button for it.

Pasting a file in an editor on Android has no meaning, you would be pasting it into the existing document, except that that's not what you want, you want to close the existing document and open the other one, which is what Open does and not what Paste does at the most fundamental level of computing metaphor. And to take the Windows 3.1 metaphor all the way, the thing you want to paste is not a file, but the content of a file, which is nonsense on desktop, but comprehensible nonsense, where in the app-and-document-centric world of Android, where files belong to apps and are often saved automatically and no longer respect an abstraction between the open document and the saved copy, it's merely an inarticulate gurgle.

The real reason Android handles screenshots correctly is that it is an interface built from the ground up to make sense instead of a fucking pile of cruft built on other cruft for workarounds relating to other cruft from fucking MS DOS. And I include popular Linuxes in that description because the pervasive need to make Linux work like Windows because fucking users throw a fucking fit when they don't have X and Y and Z from their bloody Windows machines means that every Linux desktop has design bugs inherited directly from Windows.

5, I'm sorry your image cropping app is shit.

[Von_Cheam]

Can't help observing that

Screenshot to clipboard ⇨ Super+R ⇨ Type "gimp" ⇨ Ctrl+V ⇨ Do stuff ⇨ Ctrl+Q

is quicker and less gui-ey ("gooey"?) than

Screenshot to disk ⇨ Double-click notification to open file manager ⇨ Double-click screenshot to open GIMP ⇨ Do stuff ⇨ Ctrl+Q ⇨ Select image file in file manager ⇨ Delete ⇨ Ctrl+Q

That being said, I'm in the habit of taking a bunch of screenshots in one go to deal with later, so I rarely screenshot to clipboard myself. If (and only if!) I were using a touchscreen, keyboardless interface I think I may prefer the Android solution.

Hm. I guess, if it's all about workflow, one could bind [a modifier]+PrntScr to a script that saves the screenshot to /tmp (changing mode bits/permissions if that sort of thing is a concern) and opens it in an image editor/viewer directly, right? That'd save loads of keystrokes, and as a side-benefit the screenshot would be on disk in case you wanted it later, but wouldn't hang around forever cluttering the place up.

[ucim]

It is fewer and less arcane steps than all of that nonsense with your image editor, which you've been trained into by bad design and time.

Ok, so one of the things I often do is take screenshots to use in documentation. I have an app or site open, take a screenshot, paste it into my image program, edit the image (crop, resize, add circles and arrows, and a paragraph on the back explaining each one, and save the resulting mashup. Then I go on to the next one. How in blazes is it easier if screenshot only saves to a file, which I have to search for every time, and then delete every time? Making the computer less able to do stuff is usually not such a good idea. Not everyone does what you do.

Edit: And cry me a security river if people are freely accessing deleted files in your user directory.

I work from a laptop, sometimes in foreign countries, and sometimes that laptop is connected to a different external hard drive (with the sensitive stuff I'm dealing with). My laptop hard drive should not have a copy of their sensitive data. If it's stolen (or taken by customs), it needs to be clean.

I tell the computer what to do. Not the other way around.

Jose

[Soupspoon]

(Because none of this was really the point of the comic, I had to decide what to do with the rapidly expanding text that came pouring out of my fingers (onto the touch-screen!), and decided that perhaps if I spoiler the largest tangential sections, and gave you all fair warning that I'm not looking for an argument so feel free to get the final word in without fear of my returning with any more maybe-counterarguments from me, I can let this act as a record of my views without either too much polluting the airwaves nor leaving questions begging to be answered...)

Dropbox:

Spoiler:

I just want to say that I've never used the Dropbox thing for myself, but I was the one who helped install the thing, at the request of the users concerned, and because I knew I'd possibly have to support the end-users (e.g. how to obtain the URL representing any future arbitrary set of Clouded files so as to paste that link into an email) I did make sure I noted all the options given to me during installation, and there was no clue that it would hook PrintScreen.

It also likely did not do, at that stage, because it wasn't until some time later that the issue of a screenshot no longer being (the expected form of) a screenshot came up and prompted investigation. That it was not like this originally, and that it seems like it is no longer hooked to the universal screenshot-to-buffer key-combo, indicates creature-feep both from nothing (because somebody decided it would be a handy new feature) and then onto its own keycombo (because somebody realised they'd erred in the original implementation). I actively went and looked for version-specific documentation before I vented about this, hoping to find the dated devnotes surrounding the events concerned, but gave that up as a bad job.

But I've done it myself... Installed something (or added to an install/activated a feature) on somebody's machine, only to discover that I've overridden some obscure but understandable work-process that "they are used to". And which, often, I can't fault as being "wrong", I just never knew that they actually found that original and untampered aspect of the system at all useful... The guys at dropbox probably had a similar "hey, fellow geeks, you know what would be really cool, in our next automated update..?" internal conversation, then later on realised that there were other users (and other geeks, even, who just weren't party to the internal discussion) whose days they might soon be spoiling.

Clipboard Managers:

Spoiler:

I implement mine in wetware. If (for example) I have to cut out Text A from position A and put it in position B where currently Text B is residing, that needs to be cut out and out into Text A (or any rather more complex example, across multiple data types) then between the Ctrl-Xing and Ctrl-Ving and Alt-Tabbing (as necessary, or other local system equivalents, including stuff like Ctrl-PageUp/Downing for tabs in internally tabbed workspaces) having a single 'register' is no impediment to shuffling copypasta around, and might even make it simpler and harder to lose track of. (When one copies an interesting URL, then later copies an image selection to obliterate the original URL, it's obvious that I never cared enough about the URL to remember to shove it in a spare notepad/text-editor/addressbar for the momentary duration.)

I mentioned I have a keyboard for my Android. I'd be using it right now if I could be bothered to unpack it (shift-cursor is easier to use to select blocks of text than this touchscreen interface, and simple cursoring gets me to the middle of a misspelt word, or to the point between two words where a bottom-row character has intervened instead of the intended space, also so much quicker)... I also use my (PC) keyboard heavily in GIMP, changing tools, scrolling (both horizontally and vertically), changing zoom, even repositioning/sizing the windows (Alt-Space, M(ove) or (re)S(ize), cursor-keys) and of course copy/cut/pasting, though the mouse/pen/etc gets a look-in when drawing the lines, defining a boundary box, selecting a given pixel, etc. Though I wouldn't be surprised if there was a (backup) keyboard method for even some of those functions. Anyway, the mouse is habitually perched precariously upon the edge of the laser-printer (there being no desk-space to speak of) and often gets picked up and placed on my right thigh to use, betwixt all the use of the keyboard (balanced atop my left thigh, when not astraddle both!) for everything else...

TIMTOWTDI, and sometimes what works... just works. And everybody's happy with the way it works that they use.

Cropping app suckiness:

Spoiler:

Maybe I could try a few more apps, from the hundreds of random examples I will find, and try to work out if any of those do the (rarely necessary) job any better, or if it's mostly a fault with this instantiation of Android. I've also just discovered doesn't let me install Podcast Republic, that runs happily enough on the older tablet whose battery life and thus future usefulness is rapidly diminishing. And that's with the multimedia capabilities of this tablet being sufficient for vastly more complicated stuff than mere audio, so it's likely some hidden library support beyond easy poking and prodding to rectify, and I need to pursue some other podcast software (that works differently!) to transfer my various audiophilic accumulations upon.

(The lesson here is that I'm not averse to diving into regedit via the command-line, or even the GRUB configuration file on the various linux desktops, but I find myself almost as distanced from the 'nitty gritty' of the Android system (linuxesque as it is) as Apple would wish me to be from iOS's internals (dittoish). I've never been fan of the hermetically sealed box (and thus the Mac model of computing), but for some reason I'm ensnared by Google in this instance...)

[Copper Bezel]

Okay, so you don't use a clipboard manager because you prefer fussing around between windows and tabs like a person who doesn't know what a clipboard manager is. Good Android apps are indeed hard to find, and I don't have a preferred image editor myself; it's exactly the kind of app where I feel Android has a gaping hole in third-party software vs. even desktop Linux, those little basic amenities of computing.

This part, however, you misunderstand, and I'll try to explain more clearly this time.

It also likely did not do, at that stage, because it wasn't until some time later that the issue of a screenshot no longer being (the expected form of) a screenshot came up and prompted investigation. That it was not like this originally, and that it seems like it is no longer hooked to the universal screenshot-to-buffer key-combo, indicates creature-feep both from nothing (because somebody decided it would be a handy new feature) and then onto its own keycombo (because somebody realised they'd erred in the original implementation). I actively went and looked for version-specific documentation before I vented about this, hoping to find the dated devnotes surrounding the events concerned, but gave that up as a bad job.

Ctrl+PrintScreen is not and has never been a way to invoke Dropbox in place of the system's existing screenshot tool. It is a binding within the Dropbox screenshot tool. PrintScreen all by itself does, indeed, cause Dropbox to capture the screen "by default" and in the normal, correct way, if you have set it to do so in the first place. That is what that dialog box was about, setting it to do its thing or opting not to.

Edit: ucim, missed your post in there.

It is fewer and less arcane steps than all of that nonsense with your image editor, which you've been trained into by bad design and time.

Ok, so one of the things I often do is take screenshots to use in documentation. I have an app or site open, take a screenshot, paste it into my image program, edit the image (crop, resize, add circles and arrows, and a paragraph on the back explaining each one, and save the resulting mashup. Then I go on to the next one. How in blazes is it easier if screenshot only saves to a file, which I have to search for every time, and then delete every time? Making the computer less able to do stuff is usually not such a good idea. Not everyone does what you do.

You're ... you're saving the file. You're saving the actual fucking file after you annotate it. What the actual fuck. So you ... you could just open ... the file ... and edit it.

No, fuck your workflow, no one needs to go out of their way to support your need to cut your sandwiches into rectangles rather than diagonally. You want that functionality, write it yourself.

Never mind that as already mentioned, taking a series of screenshots is still (always and forever) going to be more convenient if they go somewhere, but you'd rather jump back and forth because ... because that's how you do.

Write it yourself.

Edit: And cry me a security river if people are freely accessing deleted files in your user directory.

I work from a laptop, sometimes in foreign countries, and sometimes that laptop is connected to a different external hard drive (with the sensitive stuff I'm dealing with). My laptop hard drive should not have a copy of their sensitive data. If it's stolen (or taken by customs), it needs to be clean.

I tell the computer what to do. Not the other way around.

Jose

Move the default screenshot folder to the external. This is nonsense.

[Soupspoon]

Not for the only time, in the last week, I don't understand the arguments on a situation where I have an apparent disagreement with someone. And I do worry that it's entirely me at fault. Ask me in private/invite me onto a dedicated technical subforum thread if you really want to, but I am not polluting the comics bit any further on this business of mine. And all due apologies for the mess I already dumped here.

(As you edited after I started writing, and this wasn't even me and my point yet I feel strongly that there's a reply necessary...

Spoiler:

From my experience, each and every external drive grants itself a potentially new and different drive letter, whenever plugged in. If every time I plug a drive in I need to take time to go and change the destination to the flavour-of-the-day location, then remember to go back into options and set it back to local before closing (lest the next bootup without the external drive/with a different external drive/with the correct external drive in the wrong place leaves me open to audible or (worse) silent errors or (worserer) inappropriate saves...) then the advantages and disadasntages definitely swing against it.

And now I hate myself even more.)

[Pfhorrest]

As usual, the Mac way is correct.

Hit the screenshot keycombo and an image file appears on your desktop. Obvious and immediate access, trash the file if you're done with it, really quick and easy basic editing (cropping etc) a double-click away in the built-in image editor that opens it by default.

Screenshot to clipboard by holding an additional modifier key if you really want. Crop while screenshotting with an additional modifier too. Auto-crop to a specific window with a keystroke after that if you want.

Screenshots to clipboard by default is pants on head retarded and responsible for the whole fucking screenshots in Word docs phenomenon.

[ucim]

You're ... you're saving the file. You're saving the actual fucking file after you annotate it.

...and sometimes combine it with another screenshot (before/after, logged-in/not-logged-in...), and sometimes integrating it with another graphic. I'm trying to give you simple cases for illustration. It's actually easier to drop the clipboard into an existing graphic than to open the graphic and then copy it (again) and then merge it into something. Or merge something into it. By doing it my way I can treat the screen as a data source, roughly equivalent to any other image or text that will contribute to the final file.

Move the default screenshot folder to the external. This is nonsense.

It's not always the same external.

Scenario 1: Take a screenshot (to the clipboard), paste it into a layer of the image I'm building.

Scenario2: Take a screenshot, use the graphics program to open the screenshot (in another window), select all, copy the screenshot to the clipboard, close the window, move to the window I'm working with, paste the screenshot into a layer of the image I'm building, open a file manager, find the file with the screenshot, delete it (or open a file-scrubber, find the file with the screenshot, scrub it) (or open the command line, type the command including the path to the screenshot (yes, tab completion is nice) that scrubs the file. Ooops, wrong path - that was yesterday's, try again...)

When I take a screenshot for this application, the clipboard is where I want it. I'm fine with an option that disables screenshot-to-the-clipboard, but I'm not fine with universally doing that.

Jose

[Copper Bezel]

Not for the only time, in the last week, I don't understand the arguments on a situation where I have an apparent disagreement with someone. And I do worry that it's entirely me at fault. Ask me in private/invite me onto a dedicated technical subforum thread if you really want to, but I am not polluting the comics bit any further on this business of mine. And all due apologies for the mess I already dumped here.

If it's not clear, I'm greatly enjoying this conversation and the chance to berate others over minutiae instead of posting in another Trump thread. I've appreciated your every contribution and the opportunity it's given me to mix explanation and verbal MMA. I don't think you're at fault in anything in any way.

You're ... you're saving the file. You're saving the actual fucking file after you annotate it.

...and sometimes combine it with another screenshot (before/after, logged-in/not-logged-in...), and sometimes integrating it with another graphic. I'm trying to give you simple cases for illustration.

Your lack of familiarity with how to do these things normally may extend to more complex cases, but you're only adding instances of the same bad behavior. Drag and drop exists. If there's an image editor that doesn't support dropping an image from the file manager into an existing document as a layer, it needs to be fired.

It's not always the same external.

I dunno, RAM drive? This is a pretty damn niche case. Not everyone works for the NSA. (I'd forgotten about Windows handling mount points differently, too. That could complicate matters as well. But yeah. I imagine there's a more elaborate and possibly expensive solution to your problem somewhere. It is a highly unusual problem.)

Screenshots to clipboard by default is pants on head retarded and responsible for the whole fucking screenshots in Word docs phenomenon.

Thank FUCK you're here.

[Von_Cheam]

As usual, the Mac way is correct.

That's pretty dashed close to the long-standing default XFCE behaviour; I'd hesitate to call it "the Mac way"!

And all due apologies for the mess I already dumped here.

Totally hafta applaud your attitude here, but it really ain't your fault! It's just a combination of this well-known phenomenon..

Only on Xkcd can you start a topic involving Hitler and people spend the better part of half a dozen pages arguing about the quality of Operating Systems.

..and this well-known rhetorical technique..

[...] fucking [...] fuck [...] fuck [...] FUCK [...]

..both of which are essentially staples of The Tubes. So please don't feel bad!

Drag and drop exists. If there's an image editor that doesn't support dropping an image from the file manager into an existing document as a layer, it needs to be fired.

Like, you seem to be turning the sub-one-second key combo

Ctrl+PrntScr; Alt+Tab; Ctrl+Shift+N (for new layer); Ctrl+V

into

PrntScr; Alt+Tab to file manager; grab file with mouse; Alt+Tab+Tab to GIMP; drag onto layer panel; Alt+Tab to file manager; select and delete file; Alt+Tab back to GIMP

Or am I missing some obvious way that going through the file manager is faster/more secure/something?

[PinkShinyRose]

Drag and drop exists. If there's an image editor that doesn't support dropping an image from the file manager into an existing document as a layer, it needs to be fired.

Like, you seem to be turning the sub-one-second key combo

Ctrl+PrntScr; Alt+Tab; Ctrl+Shift+N (for new layer); Ctrl+V

into

PrntScr; Alt+Tab to file manager; grab file with mouse; Alt+Tab+Tab to GIMP; drag onto layer panel; Alt+Tab to file manager; select and delete file; Alt+Tab back to GIMP

Or am I missing some obvious way that going through the file manager is faster/more secure/something?

You bound the Alt+Tab keycombo to starting your photo editor? That's some odd behaviour. Also, to use GIMP for such simple things as saving screenshots? It loads so slow, you'd have to wait a minute just to make a screenshot.

I like cinnamons solution of prompting what you want with the printscreen after making it (I generally pick 'save as', but I use 'send to clipboard' occasionally). I also like how you can make it make a new shot of just a single window/screen/selected area.

[Copper Bezel]

Yeah, that dialog is inherited from prior versions of GNOME, and that strategy is super-common in third-party screenshot tools. It's a very sensible solution.

I dunno, if you insist on doing absolutely everything with the keyboard, not a lot of typical modern GUI stuff is going to make a great deal of sense. Keyboard shortcuts do indeed superficially sound simpler in at least some sense of the term in all cases.

In the case that you're working with a batch of screenshots to annotate and combine them, you already have the editor open after you're opened the first one, and you'd presumably leave the file manager open to manage them as you work. If you're using the clipboard there's no equivalent to that, so it's not really a matter of more or less steps in a particular process, because the individual processes are different. You wouldn't be jumping back to the file manager to delete the file and back to the editor because whether it's one screenshot or 10 you can clean up after yourself all at once afterward.

This is, of course, the case that capturing to the clipboard should theoretically be best at, because it's the case where you already have the image editor open and waiting and do intend to edit and resave the image after capturing it. But belabor the description as much as you like, even in this case the process is going to be comparable. And of course, because you're treating files, which are files, as files, you still have the source images to jump back to if something goes fucky.

[Von_Cheam]

You bound the Alt+Tab keycombo to starting your photo editor? That's some odd behaviour. Also, to use GIMP for such simple things as saving screenshots? It loads so slow, you'd have to wait a minute just to make a screenshot.

Nah, I meant Alt+Tab into an already running instance of GIMP. Guess I could've put that somewhat clearer! But even starting GIMP from scratch takes.. lemme see.. just over a second. (I don't even have a lightweight graphics program installed any more* for that very reason..)

Keyboard shortcuts do indeed superficially sound simpler in at least some sense of the term in all cases.

Crumbs! That's.. quite a sentence!

Yeah, if it were a batch, workflow-ey sorta thing I think I'd probs. turn everything into files. It's a bit slower, and clicking and dragging is kind of annoying (and that's on a desk; goodness only knows what it must be like for the guy with his mouse hopping from his lap to the printer lid and back!) but it means you can hammer away at that PrintScr key with wild abandon and they all get kept - and as you say the raw screens do hang around until you're sure you don't need them, which rather does trump the other considerations..



*Erm, unless you count imagemagick, I guess..

[Copper Bezel]

People who never learned to use laptop trackpads weird me. There are a lot of tasks for which a mouse is vastly superior, but there's really no task for which a laptop in your lap, but with a mouse, makes any sense at all. I mean, I suppose there are still Thinkpads if you'd rather a clit mouse. Drag and drop specifically is kind of not great with them, though; it's wanky, but I was playing with KDE Connect's phone-as-input-device feature on my desktop (as opposed to the HTPCs and things where it might be useful) and really appreciated the long-press, then move, "locked" drag-and-drop; slower, but less frustrating in practice.

[Flumble]

TIL in Windows 10 you can press Win+PrtSc to save a screenshot to a file and you can use Ctrl+PrtSc when the snipping tool is open to make a rectangular selection of the screen, both without affecting the clipboard with the snipping tool set to "copy snips to clipboard" by default.

[Copper Bezel]

Nice! Good to know! Thanks.

[Pfhorrest]

As usual, the Mac way is correct.

That's pretty dashed close to the long-standing default XFCE behaviour; I'd hesitate to call it "the Mac way"!

Mac has 12 years precedence over xfce, so yeah.

[Von_Cheam]

Mac has 12 years precedence over xfce, so yeah.

Crumbs, that ..was a little puzzling! But I think I'm with you now. You're saying that this:



Was released twelve years before this:



Like, erm, yes? It most certainly was...

[Copper Bezel]

Xfce also has five years on macOS, but I wasn't using either at either time and have no idea who decided that the desktop was a good place to save scrots first. Odds are good it wasn't on the initial release of either.

[Pfhorrest]

I can testify firsthand that Macs have been saving screenshots to the desktop since at least the late 80s. I actually had a Mac that looked like the one in that pic (it was a Plus, so if that's meant to be an original 128k then it was a little newer), and though it was running updated software by the time it came to me second-hand (System 6 I believe it was), it saved screenshots to the desktop.

Things like screenshotting to clipboard, cropping and window-cropping inline, and so on, were later additions, I don't remember when exactly. It used to be just the one full-screen image saved to desktop.