Taking screenshots

Dimitri

Member
I've been taking screenshots of youtube videos or movies for a while on my computer using the print screen->create new .bmp file->paste screenshot into it method and only now realized I end up with a 6 MB file.

Is there some way I can take screenshots that will end up some reasonable size?
 

Dimitri

Member
How can I do that, will changing the extension suffice? I mean, when I go new file -> bitmap image, can I just change the extension to .jpg or do I need some special software?

I should say, I use the Snipping Tool that you get with Win10 periodically when I don't want a full screen screenshot and that saves things as .png, but I'm looking at some of the pictures I've saved and they all end up >1 MB even though they're not full screen.
 
Last edited:

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
If you only need a change a few then just open it and and save it as a different file type. You can use paint or any other photo editing software.
 

Dimitri

Member
Actually, what I'd like to be able to do is take screenshots in such a way that they'd immediately be some reasonable size. I suppose that requires immediate compression, but I'm sure there's something that can do that since compression only takes a few moments.

Does anyone know of any program that can do that?
 

Dimitri

Member
Well, whatever the size range is for compressed pictures. Like, for ex. I have a 2048x1365 photo that's 211 kb and a 1024x764 image of a painting that's 95 kb. There are others of the same resolution that are a bit higher, but when I look through my pictures, most are <500 kb and many are <100 kb even though they are over 1600x900 and are movie screencaps.

Very rarely do they go over 1MB and if they do it's usually some extremely high res, high quality photo.
 

beers

Moderator
Staff member
Why does this even matter? The sizes you are quoting are trivial to begin with.

I took one of my desktop and the default mspaint for 5440x1080 saving in png with default settings came out to be about exactly 1 MB, granted it can vary a bit depending on screen contents.

You can decrease the quality of saving JPGs in some higher end software like photoshop or GIMP, but your image will lose a lot of data and look much crappier as a result.
 

Dimitri

Member
Why does this even matter? The sizes you are quoting are trivial to begin with.

Because I got 1000s of pictures on my computer (maybe 10 000s) and it's going to continue growing and whether it's 6MBs a piece or 0.05 MBs a piece makes a big difference.

You can decrease the quality of saving JPGs in some higher end software like photoshop or GIMP, but your image will lose a lot of data and look much crappier as a result.

That's not true, you can use compression software and drastically decrease the size without affecting the quality much. The process takes seconds, so I figure there could be some kind of software that takes screenshots and automatically performs compression for each shot.
 

beers

Moderator
Staff member
Because I got 1000s of pictures on my computer (maybe 10 000s) and it's going to continue growing and whether it's 6MBs a piece or 0.05 MBs a piece makes a big difference.
60 GB is still an insignificant quantity of data. You're arguing about PNGs being slightly over 1 MB, 1 MB vs .5 MB, not so much of a difference. 500k per file savings across 10,000 files is less than 5 GB.
That's not true, you can use compression software and drastically decrease the size without affecting the quality much. The process takes seconds, so I figure there could be some kind of software that takes screenshots and automatically performs compression for each shot.

JPG and PNG already do their own compressing. You can choose the amount of compression and lossiness on the quality meter, but image quality goes down in correlation with file size in lossy formats like JPG.

You don't get any 'double compression savings' from zipping already compressed files like jpg.
 

Dimitri

Member
60 GB is still an insignificant quantity of data. You're arguing about PNGs being slightly over 1 MB, 1 MB vs .5 MB, not so much of a difference. 500k per file savings across 10,000 files is less than 5 GB.

60 GB is insignificant???!

I don't know about you, but I got a 650 GB HDD that's cluttered and 60 GB is VERY significant to me :)

The PNGs are 1MB if I'm taking a shot of a section of the image, a full screen PNG is >3MB. >3MB vs <500kb is a huge difference for me, even if it were just 5 GB, that would be good enough.

JPG and PNG already do their own compressing. You can choose the amount of compression and lossiness on the quality meter,

But where, that's my point. I can't do it with any of the software I have, or possibly I could AFTER the image's been taken. I don't want to do that, I want the compression to be applied automatically.
 

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
If you have a problem with space and you keep saving screenshots, just get a bigger HDD. A 1TB drive will hold about 2 million pictures at 500kb, 1 million at 1MB file size. I don't think you'll need anything bigger.
 

Dimitri

Member
I found that if I save as .jpg with paint it's <500. Would be great if some software could compress it to <100 automatically (which is what a lot of pictures I download off the internet are), but <500 is good enough.
 
Top