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Using Stacks for Screenshots
The default set of stacks in Leopard do a pretty good job of keeping your desktop clean of downloads, but for me, the real challenge of keeping things tidy comes from the multitude of screenshots that I take everyday.
Creating a stack for screenshots is the logical answer, but because they are saved to the desktop by default, it’s impossible to do this without first making a minor tweak to how OS X handles them. There’s probably several ways to do this, but I found a free application called deeper which seems to work pretty well.
Once you’ve changed the location, it’s as simple as dragging that new folder into your dock and tweaking the stack preferences to “Sort by date added”.
Voila… now all your screenshots will be easily accessible in any application, and your desktop will be a whole lot cleaner.
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Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain, a stay at home designer from Grimsby ON, Canada. To get in touch use the contact form.
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Eric Eggert
June 10, 2008
You should really try out Skitch (http://skitch.com/) which has a iPhoto for screenshots built in and allows annotations, too.
Kyle
June 10, 2008
Seconding Skitch—it’s a really incredible piece of software that allows you to take screenshots and share them much more easily than what’s built into OS X.
Jonathan E
June 10, 2008
Great idea Jesse. I just wanted to point out that this can be accomplished by opening up a terminal and typing in the following command:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/YOUR_USER_NAME/Screenshots
All you need to do is to make sure that the “Screenshots” folder has been created BEFORE running this command and that you use the FULL path to your desired folder (no ~/ here).
I’m pretty sure this is what Deeper is doing behind the scenes anyways, but a quick Google search generated this method, so I thought I’d throw it out there.
Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain
June 10, 2008
Thanks for the Skitch recommendations guys… I’ve tried it out a couple times, but it’s never really taken hold with me. Most of my screenshots are going right back into photoshop, or directly into basecamp.
Thanks for the terminal method as well Jonathan.
Jonathan E
June 10, 2008
Just a note on my previous comment: you’ll need to log out and back in again for the changes to take effect.
Josh Pyles
June 10, 2008
For what it’s worth, I think this is a great tip! Highly considering doing this myself.
I’m a Skitch user myself and I find it good for certain screenshots, but not for the type that we as designers need (to import into Photoshop or whatever). I’m not even sure that it can do the full window screenshots.
Regardless, great tip! Thanks!
Kenzie Campbell
June 10, 2008
Not necessarily related to Stacks, but I use a great Mac app called Paparazzi and I’ve just started using the web app scrnshots.com to store them.
http://www.derailer.org/paparazzi/
http://scrnshots.com/
Derek
June 10, 2008
I also use Paparazzi. The best thing about it is being able to easily take screenshots of long pages and being able to set the minimum page width. So, if you wanted to take screenshots from a number of pages within the same site, it keeps everything lined up perfectly.
Waxstrong
June 14, 2008
I know this sounds lost, but I just can’t help saying that your site design rocks!
Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain
June 16, 2008
After a few more tries, I’m starting to warm up to skitch. The missing element for me was the cmd + shift + 5 shortcut. I also like that it does screenshots without the drop shadow. Thanks for the recommendations guys!
Kevin Milden
June 22, 2008
Absolutely. Creating a screen grab folder is imperative when setting up a new Mac. Without it you end up having hundreds of useless files on your desktop. The cool part is that you have a single place to cover flow through your past screen shots that date back months.
Robert Mathison
July 02, 2008
This ended up being much more useful than I had originally anticipated. Thank you kindly, good sir!
winliuxq
July 05, 2008
Great idea Jesse.
Ben Spencer
July 26, 2008
A great method for keeping my screenshots nice and tidy! Thanks a lot Jesse.
Will definitely give Skitch a try too.
Raja
August 09, 2008
A great method for keeping my screenshots nice and tidy! Thanks a lot Jesse.
Riester
Yesterday at 3:39am
Thanks for posting it. I`m also a stick user for myself and it works great.