Safari+Quicksilver+Paparazzi (updated)
written by Stuart on June 27th, 2006
You're a web designer, you need full screen screenshots of your sites. You use a mac, and are clever enough to have both Quicksilver and Paparazzi installed. Well, your life is pretty much complete then isn't it, read on to see how I get my full-screen sreenshots in double quick time.
Here's what I do to get my screenshots as quickly as possible.
First, you need to turn on a feature of quicksilver which allows you to get information from running applications, to use in another. You can turn on proxy objects from the quicksilver catalog, as shown below.
Next, you need to set up a trigger, which is just a key command which will run any action quicksilver understands. To do this, navigate to the triggers pane, and add a new custom trigger. The form works just like the quicksilver interface, so just type the first few letters of each stage of the trigger to complete it.
The stages are Current Web Page, Open URL With, Paparazzi as you can see here:
The last thing to do is to specify a key shortcut, I went for command+alt+p, which as far as I know, doesn't clash with any other system-wide key combination.
A job quickly done
So lets take a look at the new streamlined process. Once you have done the setup, you need only press one key combination, and the save button in paparazzi to get a full size screenshot of any website. This is a massive improvement on using paparazzi manually, or using the screenshot function in OSX.
You could take this further I'm sure. Maybe with a little automator script which matches the file name structure, and uploads the image to a private set on your flickr account. Adding that as a folder action to your screenshot folder would do it all for you.
This probably saves me ten, twenty minutes a week, since I no longer have to do everything the old fashioned way. It is another example of how quicksilver can be as powerful as you want it to be.
Update - June 28th
Since yesterday I've been thinking about how I can take this to the next level of usefulness, which means uploading these images to flickr. I've achieved that using automator, and I'll describe here below how I've done it. I've literally just finished working on this, so there might be a glitch or two in the workdflow, but it looks to be working well.
In order to do this part, you will need to have the flickr upload action for automator, which a quick google should be easy to find.
So here is the process. I've already used a trigger in quicksilver to get a full-screen screenshot. That is saving a png file into my screenshots folder.
Next, I've made a folder action in automator.
It does the following:
1. Looks in the 'screenshots' folder for PNG files, since this is what I have as the output for paparazzi.
2. Add a spotlight comment, in this case ' delete me'.
3. Upload to flickr, adding related tags.
4. Find finder items with 'delete me' in the key words.
5. Deletes them.
So what we end up with, is going from getting the screenshot, to having it uploaded and tagged, with no extra uer input. Each time a file is added to the screenshots folder, the action goes off, and if the file type matches, it follows through the action.
The only thing left to automate, is adding the photos to a specific set. Ideally, flickr would allow me to create 'smart sets' where all images with a certain tag are moved into this set, but that is probably not on the cards anytime soon. The other thing of course, would be to alter the flickr part of the automator script to allow it to add images to specific sets, but alas, I'm not automator/applescript aficionado.
Just to sum up, this is what I now do to get my full screen screenshots, and have them uploaded to flickr:
- Browse to the site I want to screenshot in safari.
- Hit CMD+ALT+P
- Save the image in the screenshots folder.
And that's it, other than that, it's all done for me.
ps - Check out the comments from Patrick Haney (not a sausage) for a few more things to note WRT getting this setup.
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An excellent idea to save time, though there are a few things to note.
First off, I don’t use Safari as my main browser, therefore the “Current Web Page” proxy object isn’t available to me (the Firefox module doesn’t allow this sort of access).
Second, it’s good to note that if you don’t see “Proxy Objects” under Catalog - Quicksilver, you should go to Settings - Extras and make sure your Application Feature Level is on “Beta.” Relaunch if necessary.
Third, Triggers seem to cause this beta version of Quicksilver to crash quite a bit. Most of the time, I couldn’t get through the process of creating a trigger without an application crash.
Hopefully at some point I can put this to work with Firefox and make my life easier.
Oh, one other thing I meant to mention. The “Current Web Page” proxy object won’t be available to you unless the Safari module (plugin) is enabled. It seems obvious, but I tend to disable it since I rarely use Safari.
Good points Patrick, I’d overlooked those. I think the proxy objects are working closing with the operating system, though I might be wrong, which would explain the lack of support in third party modules.
Also, I’ve set QS to download ‘unstable development versions’ which surprisingly are very stable! I haven’t had a hang for a couple of weeks.
I do remember having similar problems when I first activated proxy objects though, but that has settled down a lot now. I guess doing the usual things like rescanning the catalogue, and doing a reset might help.
commented on the flickr page.