I've started collecting screenshots of UI's from games that I've been playing to be able to reference later. In the past I've only ever needed one or two screenshots at any given time so I was perfectly content going from print screen > clipboard > past into paint > manually crop out what I want > save. Sure it's an annoying workflow but I did it so infrequently it was fine. The main problems with this method are that it must be done immediately upon taking the screenshot and that it requires a lot of manual actions per image.
One Click Screenshot Saving with Dropbox
I already use Dropbox for backup and storage but I've never used their save screenshot functionality until now. The option can be toggled in Preferences > Backups > Screenshots and automatically saves screenshots to a screenshots folder within your Dropbox folder. On windows you can natively get this functionality by hitting Windows Key + Print Screen to save to Pictures > Screenshots but doing it via Dropbox is one less key to remember and has the added bonus of backing up the screenshot to the cloud.
The screenshots saved this way capture the entire display which for me includes two monitors. I don't think I've ever needed a screenshot where both monitors have been relevant so the next step is to process the screenshots to be usable.
File Processing with Photoshop Batch Actions
To accomplish the automation of the image processing I first set up an action in photoshop that crops just my primary monitor, scales the image by 50% then saves it. Then I selected that action in the batch menu (File>Automate>Batch) and set the source folder to my Dropbox screenshots.
Running this goes through all the pictures in the folder and modifies them to be the correct crop and smaller to save on space.
Note that this is a destructive method - in the future I'll probably modify the action to only crop, or perhaps crop and save, then save a scaled down copy at the end of the action.
Changing the destination in the Batch menu allows for saving a copy with the name built from rules you specify - in your desired location.
This was my first experience using the batch functionality with photoshop and I'm super excited to continue exploring its possibilities! It really allowed me to simplify what I thought would be a very tedious process.
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