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Let’s take a tour through ScreenFloat and see how it can power up your screenshots, too.

ScreenFloat powers up your screenshots by allowing you to take screenshots and recordings that float above everything else, keeping certain information always in sight. Its Shots Browser stores your shots and helps you organize, name, tag, rate, favorite and find them. Everything syncs across your Macs.
Extract, view and copy detected text, faces and barcodes. Edit, annotate, markup and redact your shots effortlessly and non-destructively. Pick colors any time. And more.

Posts in this Series

Part IAn Overview
Part IITake Screenshots and Record your Screen
Part IIIFloating Shots, Color Picker, Visibility
Part IVThe Shots Browser, Exporting, Printing
Part VEditing, Markup, Annotations
Part VIFloating Shots’ Double-Click Workflows
Part VIIiCloud Sync, Tags Browser, Spotlight
Part VIIIShortcuts and Widgets

Part VI – Floating Shots’ Double-Click Workflows

From time to time, you’ll find yourself doing something over and over again, like resize an image before you send it in an email, or crop an image before you annotate it, or duplicate a screen recording before you remove its audio tracks.
ScreenFloat speeds that up by providing customizable double-click workflows for your floating shots.

Table of Contents

– Setting up Double-Click Workflows
– Available Actions

Setting up Double-Click Workflows

Double-Click workflows are set up in ScreenFloat’s settings. You can reach them by clicking on ScreenFloat’s menu bar icon in the right portion of your menu bar; or by right-clicking any floating shot; or by pressing command (⌘) – , in the Shots Browser. Select Floating Shots, and you’ll be ready to get going:

Double-click workflows are based on your keyboard’s modifier keys (command (⌘), option (⌥), control (^), shift (⇧) and fn). You can set up workflows for when no modifier key is pressed (a simple double-click onto the floating shot), or when any combination of those modifier keys is pressed (i.e., command-double-click, command-shift-double-click a floating shot).
This allows you to set up not just one, but multiple double-click workflows, tailored to different situations or requirements.

To add a double-click action to a workflow, hold down the modifier keys of your choice (or none) and press the + button at the bottom left of the list.
To make changing workflows with modifier keys easier, you can press the lock button at the bottom of the list to “lock in” the currently pressed modifier keys. Now you can let them go and still edit the workflow for that set of keys. Press the lock again to unlock the keys.

Switching through my double-click workflows by pressing different modifier keys on my keyboard.

The – button allows you to remove selected actions from the current workflow, remove all actions from the current workflow, or completely reset all your double-click workflows.

Available Actions

Actions in a workflow are performed in the order they appear in the list when you add them.
This order is more or less pre-defined and cannot be changed: for instance, the Duplicate Shot action is always added to the top of the list, and thus, performed first when the double-click workflow runs.
On the other hand, Copy as File is performed last, so you can have a double-click workflow where you crop, resize and annotate a shot, and after that, that newly edited shot is copied.

Here, we set up a workflow that, when we double-click a shot with the fn-option-command modifier keys pressed, will duplicate the shot first, then allow for cropping and annotation, then copies the resulting new image file.

Let’s go over the list of available actions.

Some of these actions are only available when image shots are double-clicked:
– Lower image resolution
– Annotate Shot
while others are only available for screen recordings:
– Copy Still Image from Video
– Trim Video
– Remove Audio

Let’s go over some that might need further explanation:

Copy Clicked Text (Additive)
When you double-click a text line in a shot with this active, that text line gets copied.
Double-click another in the same shot, and it gets added to the previous copy.

Copy Still Image from Video
Copies the currently displayed frame in a floating video shot.

Open Copy With
Allows you to specify two apps: one for image shots, and one for video shots.

Export to Folder
Lets you select a folder on your disk to save the double-clicked shot to in its native PNG format right away.

Resize Shot
Allows you to specify a percentage to resize to (25%, 50%, 75%, 125%, 150%, 175%, 200%), or to resize it manually.

Rotate
Rotate the shot clockwise, or counterclockwise.

Rate Shot
Specify a rating to give the shot when double-clicking it (from no rating to 1-5 stars).

Add to Folder
Specify a folder the shot should be added to, or let the double-click show the folders menu so you can select one on the fly.

Add Tag
Specify a tag to tag the double-clicked shot with, or show the Tags menu to select one on the fly.

Toggle Opacity Between 100% and
Select an opacity level all the way down to 40% to toggle between with a double-click.

Toggle Visibility Between Everywhere and
Select “Current Space” or “Currently Active App” as an option. Double-click to set it to, say, Currently Active App, then double-click it again to toggle it back to Everywhere.

Some actions are mutually exclusive. For instance, you can’t have both Copy All Detected Text and Copy Clicked Text in one and the same action, because one would override the other, and only the last operation would “take”.

Running a double-click workflow on a floating image shot that automatically reduces the shot’s resolution to 72 dpi, then asks me to resize it, then to crop/fold it, and then shows the Share menu.

Up Next

The next part of this series – Part VII: iCloud Sync, Tags Browser, Spotlight – takes a detailed look at ScreenFloat’s iCloud sync, the Tags Browser, and system-wide Spotlight search. Definitely take a look, there’s a lot of neat stuff there!

Links

ScreenFloat Website (+ free trial)
ScreenFloat on the Mac App Store (one-time purchase, free for existing customers)
ScreenFloat Usage Tips

Eternal Storms Software Productivity Apps Bundle (Yoink, ScreenFloat and Transloader at ~25% off)
Contact & Connect

Thank you for your time. I do hope you enjoy ScreenFloat!

Read more

Let’s take a tour through ScreenFloat and see how it can power up your screenshots, too.

ScreenFloat powers up your screenshots by allowing you to take screenshots and recordings that float above everything else, keeping certain information always in sight. Its Shots Browser stores your shots and helps you organize, name, tag, rate, favorite and find them. Everything syncs across your Macs.
Extract, view and copy detected text, faces and barcodes. Edit, annotate, markup and redact your shots effortlessly and non-destructively. Pick colors any time. And more.

Posts in this Series

Part IAn Overview
Part IITake Screenshots and Record your Screen
Part IIIFloating Shots, Color Picker, Visibility
Part IVThe Shots Browser, Exporting, Printing
Part VEditing, Markup, Annotations
Part VIFloating Shots’ Double-Click Workflows
Part VIIiCloud Sync, Tags Browser, Spotlight
Part VIIIShortcuts and Widgets

Part V – Editing, Markup, Annotations

At some point, you will want to crop, resize, rotate or annotate your shots. Perhaps you might want to trim your videos, or remove their audio tracks. Read on to learn how ScreenFloat makes this easy and pain-free for you.

Table of Contents

– Crop
– Fold
– Resize and “De-Retinize”
– Rotate
– Trim, Remove Audio
– Annotations, Markup and Redactions

Editing, Markup, Annotations

Right-click any floating shot or shot in the Shots Browser to edit it.
By the way, in ScreenFloat 2, you can now duplicate shots, in case you just want to test a crop or rotation, or want to remove audio tracks from a screen recording but still want it around for later.

Crop

Cropping allows you to cut out a certain portion of your screenshot or recording.
At the top left, you’ll see the dimensions of your selection, and the current zoom level.

Snap to edges can help you crop at just the right edge of a window, for example.
Hold down the command (⌘) key to temporarily disable snapping while changing the selection rectangle.

While changing the selection rectangle, hold down the option (⌥) key to change its size around its center point.
Click and drag the area of your selection rectangle to move it around.

You can also adjust the rectangle with your keyboard’s arrow keys:
– Up, down, left, right moves the rectangle up, down, left, right by 1px. Hold down the shift (⇧) key to increase it to 5px.
– Up, down, left, right while holding down the option key (⌥) increases or decreases the selection rectangles width or height by 1px. Hold down the shift (⇧) key to increase it to 5px.

Aspect Ratios
In case you’re shooting for a specific aspect ratio, ScreenFloat has you covered for the most popular of them. Right-click the cropping area and select it.

Fold

“Folding” is a concept I came up with trying to remove unwanted parts from within screenshots of my apps’ App Store pages, like the “Also Included In” bar. By folding, you remove a vertical or horizontal middle section of an image, and stitch the remaining two parts back together, as if nothing was ever in between.
Before I confuse you even more, here’s a video of it in action:

Note how, in the beginning, there is the “Ratings” bar, and the “Also Included In” bar below Yoink’s icon – both of which we don’t need in our screenshot.
So we Crop the shot and select Fold Vertically, which allows me to select a vertical portion of the screenshot I want to remove along the entire width of it. We click Fold, and those two bars that were there before are now gone, and the image stitched back together.
We then go in a second time and Fold Horizontally, because the screenshot is rather wide. So we select a horizontal portion along the entire height of the screenshot and click Fold to remove that as well.
Voilá, our finished screenshot! And we didn’t have to manually fumble around to re-align things.

Folding is only available for image shots.

Resize and “De-Retinize”

Resizing screenshots is one of the most common things to do, so it better be quick and easy to do.

Width and height are ratio locked when you resize a shot, which means that when you enter a new width, the new height will be auto-calculated for you, and vice-versa.
However, I’ve often been finding myself in Preview.app wanting to resize to exactly half, or a quarter of the current size. So in ScreenFloat, you can do that, without having to wreck your brain about what half of 180px is. You can just select 50% and it’ll do the math for you.

When you take a screenshot on a Mac’s retina display, its resolution is usually 144 dpi. It leads to a nice and clear screenshot. In some situations, however, you don’t require that high a resolution.
Select Reduce resolution, and it will be reduced down to 72 dpi, leading to a smaller file size, albeit with reduced quality.

Rotate

There’s not much to say about this one – you can rotate your image- and video shots clockwise and counterclockwise. That’s… it. That’s the feature.

Trim, Remove Audio

Another one of those self-explanatory things.
You can trim screen recordings’ beginnings and ends.

You can also remove a recording’s audio tracks. It is handy when you’ve recorded your microphone along with your recording for internal purposes, but you still want to send the video to someone else. Remove the audio tracks and send it. And if you duplicate the shot first, you’ll still have the original screen recording with the audio track for later.
You can choose between removing all audio tracks, only the microphone track, or only the system audio track:

Annotations, Markup and Redactions

In ScreenFloat 2, you can annotate, markup and redact your screenshots.

All redactions and annotations are entirely non-destructive. That means you can always go back in and make changes to your annotations, or remove them entirely and restore the original shot.

QuickSmart Redaction
Let’s begin with “QuickSmart” redaction. Right-click a text line, face or barcode and redact it without any further effort on your part.
I couldn’t decide between “quick” and “smart”, so I just used both. Names are hard, but I got lucky that time.

QuickSmart-redacting a line of text, a face, and viewing the contents of a QR code.

The type of redaction (blockout, pixellate, blur) used for QuickSmart-redaction is based on what you’ve set up the redaction tool to be when manually annotating. But we’ll get to that in a bit. **

Annotate, Markup, Redact
To begin, right-click a shot (floating, or in the Shots Browser) and select Annotate… .

At the top, you’ll find your tools. From left to right, they are:
– Select: Select, move and manipulate one or multiple annotations space bar on your keyboard
– Freedraw 1 on your keyboard
– Rectangle 2
– Oval 3
– Line 4
– Arrow 5
– Star 6
– Checkmark 7
– X-Mark 8
– Text
– Smart Numbered List
– Highlight 9 on your keyboard
– Redact 0

Double-click any of these tools (or press their number on the keyboard twice) to adjust their properties for future annotations. These are the tool’s defaults and used for every new annotation.
Use the Select tool and double-click an annotation (or multiple) to change their properties. This will only affect them, and not become your new defaults.

Double-clicking a tool reveals its drawing properties.

In the screenshot above, I double-clicked the Redact tool to be able to switch between the Redaction Styles blockout, pixellate, and blur.
If I choose Blockout, the Blockout Color will come into play, which will be used to completely block the part you overlay with this redaction.
** Like I said above, the Redaction Style you select here will be used for QuickSmart redaction.

The line-based tools (from freedraw to x-mark) all offer the following properties:

The tool-settings for Freedraw.

– Line Width: How thick a line to draw (1px, 3px, 6px, 9px, 12px)
– Line Style: Solid, dashed and dotted.
– Stroke Color: The color of the line you’re drawing, the rectangle’s bounds or circle’s outline.
– Background Color: A background for the entire annotation, based on its bounding box.
– Fill Color: Rectangles, Ovals, Arrows, Stars, Check- and X-Marks also offer a fill color.
– Rectangle Corners: For rectangles, you can choose between sharp and rounded corners.
– Arrow Style: For arrows, you can choose between “line arrow”, “shape arrow” and “back-and-forth” arrow
– Check- and X-Mark Corners: Choose between sharp, rounded rect, circle or none.

Using freedraw, rectangles, ovals, lines, arrows, stars, check- and x-marks.

Text Annotation
You can change the font, the size, and text- and background colors.

Adding a text annotation, adjusting its text- and background color.

Smart Numbered Lists
This allows you to add self-increasing numbers (or letters) to your image, for example, when writing a mail with instructions on how to perform an action on the computer, you could use this to add steps, like 1, 2, 3, and then reference them in the mail.

Using the smart numbered list tool to add “steps”. Removing one automatically updates the rest.

You can choose between numbers (1-x) or letters (A-Z, then A1, B1, … Z1, A2, B2, etc), and change their borders and colors.

Highlight
You draw a highlight around an object you’d like to draw attention to, by “tuning out” the rest of the image.

The text above, highlighted with the Highlight tool.

You can change the corners of the highlight (sharp, rounded or oval), and the dimming color (all alpha values supported).

Redact
Use the Redact tool to obscure something in a screenshot you don’t wish to share.

Using the Redact tool to blockout, pixellate and blur details in an image.

Please note that researchers have been able to reverse blur- and pixellate effects, so for sensitive information, please consider using blockout.

Select
Use the Select tool to select existing annotations and move them around, manipulate them, or edit their properties.

Editing an already annotated image and changing its redactions, drawing a freedraw line and changing its properties, too.

As you can see above, it’s easy to go back into an already annotated shot and change or remove its annotations, and edit those annotations’ properties with a simple double-click.

Tips
– Annotating supports undo and redo. Press command (⌘) – Z to undo, command (⌘) – shift (⇧) – Z to redo, or right-click to reveal the contextual menu and select it there
– With the Select tool, hold down the option (⌥) key on your keyboard and click-and-drag an annotation (or multiple) to duplicate it and its properties (alternatively, select them and press command (⌘) – D)
– Select all annotations easily by click-dragging with the Select tool onto the background, or by pressing command (⌘) – A on your keyboard
– Delete annotations by selecting them and pressing the backspace / delete key on your keyboard
– If you have an iPad and use Sidecar, you can use your Apple Pencil to make annotations, and you can switch between your current tool and the Select tool by double-tapping the Pencil. Hold down the command (⌘) key and double-tap to select the next tool, or hold down the option (⌥) key and double-tap to select the previous tool (from left to right)
– Move annotations around by click-and-dragging them, or with the arrow keys on your keyboard
– Remember that you can always export and drag shots to other apps with and without annotations
– Annotations/markup and redactions are non-destructive – you’ll always be able to restore the original image, or go in and make changes
– Change an arrow’s direction by holding down the option (⌥) key on your keyboard when you start to draw it (video – first we draw an arrow without the option key pressed, then with)

Up Next

The next part of this series – Part VI: Floating Shots’ Double-Click Workflows – takes a detailed look at everything you can do with a simple double-click onto a floating shot. Definitely take a look, there’s a lot of neat stuff there!

Links

ScreenFloat Website (+ free trial)
ScreenFloat on the Mac App Store (one-time purchase, free for existing customers)
ScreenFloat Usage Tips

Eternal Storms Software Productivity Apps Bundle (Yoink, ScreenFloat and Transloader at ~25% off)
Contact & Connect

Thank you for your time. I do hope you enjoy ScreenFloat!

Read more

Let’s take a tour through ScreenFloat and see how it can power up your screenshots, too.

ScreenFloat powers up your screenshots by allowing you to take screenshots and recordings that float above everything else, keeping certain information always in sight. Its Shots Browser stores your shots and helps you organize, name, tag, rate, favorite and find them. Everything syncs across your Macs.
Extract, view and copy detected text, faces and barcodes. Edit, annotate, markup and redact your shots effortlessly and non-destructively. Pick colors any time. And more.

Posts in this Series

Part IAn Overview
Part IITake Screenshots and Record your Screen
Part IIIFloating Shots, Color Picker, Visibility
Part IVThe Shots Browser, Exporting, Printing
Part VEditing, Markup, Annotations
Part VIFloating Shots’ Double-Click Workflows
Part VIIiCloud Sync, Tags Browser, Spotlight
Part VIIIShortcuts and Widgets

Part IV – The Shots Browser, Exporting, Printing

Every shot you capture with or import to ScreenFloat is stored for you in the Shots Browser, and synced across your Macs over iCloud. Read on to learn how the Shots Browser helps you organize, name, tag, rate, favorite and find your shots, and keep your Desktop clutter-free in the process.

Table of Contents

– Your Shots at a Glance
– The Info Panel
– Categories, Folders and Smart Folders
– Finding Shots
– Settings and Privacy
– Exporting
– Printing

The Shots Browser

Open the Shots Browser with its keyboard shortcut (by default, ⇧ ⌘ 1), or from the app’s icon in the menu bar. It will open up in any app or space you’re in so it won’t take you away from what you’re doing at any given time.

Your Shots at a Glance

In the Shots Browser, you can access your Shots (center), folders (left panel), and detailed information about selected shots (right panel).

Your shots are sorted by their creation date (newest first) by default, with the option to change it to date last used, favorites first (by date favorited), rating, titles, file sizes, dimensions and kind (image or video).

You can see a preview image (1), title (2), type and dimensions or duration (3), its rating, favorite status and whether it’s floating (4).

A selected shot in the Shots Browser

Pinch on your Magic Trackpad, or use the slider at the bottom left to adjust the size of the previews.

Double-click a shot (or press enter when shots are selected) to make them float, or press the space bar to use Quick Look. 0-5 will rate them. Press f to (un-)favorite them. Right-click selected shots to reveal more options, or to edit/annotate them. Shots you don’t want shown under All Shots can be hidden, so they only appear in the “Hidden Shots” folder, and folders you have set up to include hidden shots.
You can click into a title to rename the shot quickly, or you can open…

The Info Panel

In the Info panel, you can edit the selected shots’ title, tags, notes and rating (1), see their metadata (2), as well as access and re-scan the shot’s detected text (3).

Tags will auto-complete as you type them, weighted by whether they’re favorites or not. Click the loupe button to reveal the Tag Browser (which we’ll talk about in a future installment of this series), or long-click/right-click it to get a list of all your tags to select from.

Notes are useful to add additional information, like the source of a screenshot – for example, a link.

Under Information (2) you can view the shot’s metadata: Its dimensions, duration (if it’s a screen recording), file size, the creation date, what application it was captured in, and what device it was captured on.

Detected Text (3) will show all of the text ScreenFloat detected in the shot – including a barcode’s contents. Here, you can select and copy it.
Click the refresh button to re-detect faces, or re-detect text in the shot, with custom preprocessing filters if you wish.

Custom preprocessing is useful in cases where ScreenFloat’s default settings don’t yield the results you’re looking for:

Using custom preprocessing filters to help ScreenFloat in detecting text. In this case, we’re applying a grayscale and color invert filter, along with language correction and Threshold Otsu to get the results we want.

You can also edit detected lines, and omit lines you don’t want detected at all.

Categories, Folders and Smart Folders

Having tons of shots will eventually require some sort of organization. That’s where folders are helpful.

Categories
First of all, ScreenFloat comes with a bunch of helpful pre-defined categories:

Most of them can be adjusted to your preferences. For instance, if you use the High Rating category, right-click it and you’ll be able to specify what a “high rating” is to you – only five stars? Or four and up?

The Hidden Shots category shows all shots you have hidden from your library. It is not shown by default, can be activated as seen in the screenshot above, and can be protected with a privacy setting (see Settings and Privacy).

The Trash is where all your trashed shots will be kept for a while, until they’re deleted automatically (by default, that’s 14 days, but again, you can adjust this to your liking from 1 day to never. It, too, can be protected with the Privacy setting.

Folders
Folders are your tool to manually collect shots. Create a new folder by clicking the + button next to “Folders” in the navigation panel, or by dragging selected shots over to the Folders section directly.

In a folder, you can sort shots manually, or by other criteria we discussed above.
Right-click a folder to be able to rename it, duplicate it, export all shots it contains (which you can also do by dragging the folder to Finder, for example), set it up to show or not show shots hidden from your library, or delete the folder, with the option to deep-delete the shots it contains, too.

Smart Folders
Smart Folders are populated with Shots automatically, based on rules you set up.
Rules can be created with the following shot data:
– Title
– Tags
– Notes
– Rating
– Favorite status
– The app the shot was taken in
– The source of the shot (screen capture, import, share extension, from shortcuts, from clipboard, from selected text, from text on clipboard, from a video shot’s still image, continuity camera)
– Shot Kind (image or video)
– Origin (which Mac the shot was captured on)
– Whether it was annotated
– Annotation Text content
– Whether text was detected in the shot
– Detected text content
– Whether the shot contains faces
– Whether the shot contains barcodes
– The number of tags
– Whether the shot is currently floating
– Whether the shot is currently floating, but hidden
– Creation date
– Date favorited
– Date last used
– Date last closed
– Date trashed
– Whether it’s in one or more folders
– Whether it was duplicated
Additionally, you can specify whether you want hidden or trashed shots included or not.

As an example, you could set up a Smart Folder that collects shots that you took in your browser, which have detected text that contains “http”, to have easy access to all links you have captured.

Double- or right-click a Smart Folder to edit its rules.

Drag folders and smart folders around to change the order they appear in.

Speaking of Smart Folders, let’s talk about:

Finding Shots

The same rules you already know from Smart Folders can be used to find shots in the Shots Browser.
Click on the loupe button in the Shots Browser to show the search panel, then Advanced… to edit your rules.
If you just need to do a quick search without elaborate rules, enter some text and results appear straight away, with the option to filter the text search further down to titles, notes, tags, detected texts, or text annotations.

Hold down the option (⌥) key, and the Done button will change to Save, so you can save your search as a Smart Folder.

You can also find your Shots system-wide using Spotlight, which we’ll talk about more in a future installment of this series.

Settings and Privacy

There are a couple of settings for the Shots Browser we should take a look at.

Folder shots count
With this enabled, you’ll see the number of shots in your folders.

Status bar
Enables the status bar at the bottom of the Shots Browser. It shows you the number of shots, how many are selected, or, when searching, how many results there are. Also allows you to manually sync.

Spotlight: Index shots
Enables system-wide Spotlight search of your shots. More on that in a future installment of this series.

Privacy: Use Touch ID or password
With this enabled, (smart) folders that contain trashed or hidden shots will require authentication before displaying their contents.

Automatically Empty Trash
The interval in which the trash should be emptied automatically. Can be set from 1 day to Never.
This can also be changed by right-clicking the Trash in the Shots Browser.

Library Location
By default, ScreenFloat stores its library in your User folder under ~/Library/Group Containers/G78RJ6NLJU.group.at.EternalStorms.ScreenFloat/Library/Application Support/ .
With this, you can move it to a different location. Requires a relaunch.

Exporting

ScreenFloat allows you to export single, multiple, or a folder’s worth of shots. Let’s take a look at all the settings.

Naming
The exported files can have filenames with:
– Their titles
– Their titles and creation date
– Their creation date and title
– A sequential number
– Just their creation date

Include notes, tags as metadata
With this selected, ScreenFloat writes notes and tags you specified for a shot into the shot’s file metadata. In the case of an image format (PNG, JPEG, TIFF, HEIC), it uses the appropriate IPTC fields.
In the case of a PDF, it’s written into the PDF’s subject and keywords fields. If it’s a screen recording, it’s a custom metadata field.

Include annotations
With this selected, the image is exported with its annotations, markups and redactions. If this is not selected, the plain image will be exported.

Format
Choose between PNG, JPEG, TIFF, PDF and HEIC.
JPEG and HEIC offer a quality setting, TIFF a compression setting, and PDF permission settings.

Size
Restrict the exported image’s size by longest or shortest side, width or height.

Alpha
Available for PNG, TIFF and HEIC. Whether the exported image file has an alpha channel.

Reduce resolution (72 dpi)
When screenshots are taken on a retina display, they usually have a high resolution, like 144 dpi.
With this selected, all high-dpi-images’ resolution will be reduced to 72 dpi, resulting in a smaller file size, but also reduced quality.

Remove all audio
For screen recordings. Will remove all audio tracks from the resulting video file.

Size
Same as above.

Printing

The settings for printing are pretty self-explanatory, so I’ll just leave you with two screenshots of ScreenFloat’s print dialog:

ScreenFloat’s print options.
ScreenFloat’s print options with horizontal splitting selected.

Up Next

The next part of this series – Part V: Editing, Markup, Annotations – takes a detailed look at all the advantages that floating shots have. Definitely take a look, there’s a lot of neat stuff there!

Links

ScreenFloat Website (+ free trial)
ScreenFloat on the Mac App Store (one-time purchase, free for existing customers)
ScreenFloat Usage Tips

Eternal Storms Software Productivity Apps Bundle (Yoink, ScreenFloat and Transloader at ~25% off)
Contact & Connect

Thank you for your time. I do hope you enjoy ScreenFloat!

Read more

Let’s take a tour through ScreenFloat and see how it can power up your screenshots, too.

ScreenFloat powers up your screenshots by allowing you to take screenshots and recordings that float above everything else, keeping certain information always in sight. Its Shots Browser stores your shots and helps you organize, name, tag, rate, favorite and find them. Everything syncs across your Macs.
Extract, view and copy detected text, faces and barcodes. Edit, annotate, markup and redact your shots effortlessly and non-destructively. Pick colors any time. And more.

Posts in this Series

Part IAn Overview
Part IITake Screenshots and Record your Screen
Part IIIFloating Shots, Color Picker, Visibility
Part IVThe Shots Browser, Exporting, Printing
Part VEditing, Markup, Annotations
Part VIFloating Shots’ Double-Click Workflows
Part VIIiCloud Sync, Tags Browser, Spotlight
Part VIIIShortcuts and Widgets

Part III – Floating Shots, Color Picker, Visibility

Floating Shots are one of the core features of ScreenFloat. Read on to learn how to get the most out of them and use them to your advantage.

Table of Contents

– Floating Shot Visibility
– Text-, Face- and Barcode Detection
– Color Picker
– Editing, Annotations, Markup
– Drag and Drop Sharing
– The “Action” Menu
– Double-Click Workflows

Floating Shots

Shots you capture will float on your screen above everything else. Think of it as Picture-in-Picture for your screenshots. They will also be automatically stored in your Shots Browser, which we’ll talk about further down.

It’s great for keeping a reference to anything on your screen visible at all times. In the video above, it’s a QR code, but it could be anything else, like banking information, a code sample, or a reference image.

Floating Shot Visibility

You can move floating shots around and resize them like any other window.
Floating shots can be closed or hidden. The difference is simple:
When you close a shot, it disappears and can be accessed again in the Shots Browser.
When you hide a shot, it also disappears, but can be quickly recalled by un-hiding it.

This is perfect for situations where shots might cover parts of your screen you need to get to without moving stuff around, or when you know you don’t need them right now, but will soon, or repeatedly, even.
You can hide and unhide all currently floating shots by pressing ^ ⌥ ⌘ H on your keyboard, or from ScreenFloat’s icon in your menu bar.

Hide a single shot by hovering over its close button, or by right-clicking it.

Hovering over the close button reveals more options

Consequently, you can unhide individual shots by selecting them from ScreenFloat’s icon in your menu bar, under Unhide Floating Shots.

Hidden Shots are grouped together by the timestamp they were hidden at so that you can have different “sets” of active floating shots.

Move your mouse cursor over a floating shot and scroll up and down to change its opacity – very useful for revealing what’s underneath, for example, when trying to compare two versions of something.
Speaking of which, you can make floating shots temporarily ignore all mouse input so you can click and drag through them – perfect for drawing through a shot, for instance.

Changing a floating shot’s opacity, and making it ignore mouse input.

Activate ScreenFloat’s “Work mode” so that when you move your mouse cursor over a floating shot, it disappears, and reappears when you exit. Alternatively, you can just hold down the command key (⌘) on your keyboard to temporarily toggle this setting.

Set up a floating shot to appear everywhere, in the current space only, or only when the current app is active – very useful for captures you only require whenever you’re working in a certain app.

Changing a floating shot’s visibility to “Currently Active App”, so it’ll only be visible when the Finder is active.
Text-, Face- and Barcode Detection

ScreenFloat detects text, faces and barcodes in every shot you take, allowing you to easily extract, view, copy and (non-destructively) redact information with just a simple right-click.

A few things to note in the video above:
– Copying text: You can choose to copy single lines of text by right-clicking onto it directly, copy all text by right-clicking anywhere, or append-copy specific lines of text, which allows you to paste them all in a single paste operation
– “Quicksmart” Redaction: Right-click on a text line, face, or barcode and select Redact to non-destructively redact them. Naturally, you can easily redact all text / all faces / all barcodes, too.
– Barcodes: ScreenFloat supports a large variety of barcodes and QR codes’ contents, like calendar events, vCards, links, text, and more. You can QuickLook them, copy them or in the case of vCards and calendar events save them to the according app or your disk.

Extracting/copying/viewing text and barcodes is also available in paused screen recordings (still images).

Color Picker

Floating shots come with a handy color picker. Option (⌥) – click-and-drag anywhere on a floating shot and the picker will pop up.

Release the mouse button when you’re at the color you want to pick. A menu will appear, allowing you to copy the color’s hex-, RGB-, float-, or hsl values, or a sample color image. You can even drag it onto a target in another app, making it easy to use the color right away.
Recently picked colors are saved for you to access from the picker menu itself, or ScreenFloat’s widgets (which we’ll talk about in a later installment of this blog series).

If you’re using a Magic Mouse, you can adjust the color picker’s “crosshair” on the fly by scrolling up or down while you’re picking colors. If not, you can adjust the size in ScreenFloat’s settings.

Editing, Annotations, Markup

We’ll talk about this in more detail in the next installment of this series, but for now, here’s a short overview of the changes you can make to shots and recordings:

Screenshots
– Crop and Fold
– Resize/Scale
– Rotate
– Reduce the shot’s resolution (from a “retina” dpi of 144 or more to 72 dpi)
– Annotate/Markup: Freedraw, lines, ovals, rectangles, arrows, stars, checkmarks, x-marks, text, highlight and redact (block, pixelate, blur). Markup is non-destructive, so you can always come back later and make changes, or remove them. If you’re using Sidecar with an iPad, ScreenFloat supports the Apple Pencil’s double-tap to switch through the different tools.

Screen Recordings
– Crop
– Resize/Scale
– Rotate
– Trim
– Remove audio tracks

Drag and Drop Sharing

Probably nothing is more important than being able to share screenshots and recordings. That’s why in ScreenFloat, it’s extra easy, and extra powerful at the same time.

Just drag that little document icon of a floating shot and you’ll be able to drag the shot as-is anywhere you wish.

If you prefer a certain file format, however, or if you want to reduce the shot’s resolution or dimensions before dragging it somewhere, click that document icon instead, and all sorts of options will become available to you:

Here are the drag-sharing options available to you, shown in the video above:
– Change the file format (PNG, JPEG, TIFF, PDF, HEIC)
– Reduce the resolution (from 144+ “retina” dpi to 72 dpi)
– Resize the image (by longest/shortest side, or width/height)
– Whether markup and annotations should be included, or just the original image should be shared
– Whether notes and tags should be included as file metadata

Clicking any of the file format options will also let you set it as your default for quick-dragging, should you prefer, say, JPEG over PNG files for sharing.

The “Action” Menu

Right-click any floating shot, or click on the little gear icon in the top right to access the “Action” menu. It contains everything you need for working with your shots.

Some of these we’ll talk about in more detail in a future installment of this series, so for now, let’s go over all of them and see what they do.

Detected Data (not shown in the screenshot above)
When you right-click onto a text line, a face or barcode directly, you’ll have the option to view, copy or redact it easily with this (see above)

Share
– Copy: Allows you to copy the PNG/MOV file of the shot, or in case of screenshots, the image data in different formats
– Extract Still Image From Video (recordings only; not shown in the screenshot above): Extract the current frame from the video into a new shot, or copy it to the clipboard
– Open Copy With: Open a copy of the shot with a compatible app
– Share: Your standard share menu, with the additional option of uploading the shot to iCloud and sharing a link to it, instead of a potentially large file.
– Detected Data: Offers you to view, copy and redact all or individual text lines, barcodes and faces.
– Export…: Export the shot to a folder of your choice, into different file formats, quality, and more

Edit
– Edit Info…: Edit the title, notes and tags of the shot (useful in the Shots Browser)
– Resize…: Resize/scale the shot, and/or reduce its resolution
– Rotate: Rotate the shot (counter-)clockwise
– Trim (recordings only; not shown in the screenshot above): Trim the video’s beginning and end
– Remove Audio (recordings only; not shown in the screenshot above): Remove the video’s audio tracks
– Annotate…: Add annotations, redactions and markup to the shot (coming in the next installment)
– Re-capture and Delete…: Allows you to re-capture the area of this shot was captured in, then deletes the original

Organize
– Add to Favorites: Favorite the shot (useful in the Shots Browser)
– Add to: Add the shot to an existing or new folder in the Shots Browser
– Rating: Rate the shot from between 0-5 stars (useful in the Shots Browser)
– Show in Shots Browser: Opens the Shots Browser and selects and reveals this shot
– Settings…: Open ScreenFloat’s settings

Visibility
– Ignore Mouse Clicks: makes the shot temporarily ignore mouse input (see above)
– Visibility: Make this shot appear everywhere, only in the current space, or only when the current app is active (see above)
– Hide Shot: Hides this shot, so it disappears, but you can recall it quickly from ScreenFloat’s menu bar icon (see above)
– Close Shot: Closes the Shot to the Shots Browser

While the “Action” menu is shown, press option (⌥) and/or shift (⇧), fn or command (⌘) to reveal alternate options for many of these entries.

Double-Click Workflows

For things you find yourself doing repeatedly, you can use double-click workflows.
For instance, if you find yourself always reducing a shot’s resolution before you mail it to somebody, set up a double-click workflow for it, to automate the process. Now you only have to double-click the floating shot and its resolution will be reduced, and then attached to a new eMail, all in one fell swoop.

Double-clicking the floating shot rotates it clockwise and then opens a new mail message with it, thanks to a custom double-click workflow.

We’ll talk more about these workflows in a future installment of this series – there are a lot of options available.

Up Next

The next part of this series – Part IV: The Shots Browser – takes a detailed look at the Shots Browser and how it can help you keep organized. Definitely take a look, there’s a lot of neat stuff there!

Links

ScreenFloat Website (+ free trial)
ScreenFloat on the Mac App Store (one-time purchase, free for existing customers)
ScreenFloat Usage Tips

Eternal Storms Software Productivity Apps Bundle (Yoink, ScreenFloat and Transloader at ~25% off)
Contact & Connect

Thank you for your time. I do hope you enjoy ScreenFloat!

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