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 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).
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:
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:
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!