How to Use Screen Shots with iPhoto

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

iPhoto application
Grab Application

Step 1

In your Applications Folder, you will find a folder labeled 'Utilities' in this folder, you will find the grab Application. Double click and open it. As you will want to use this application often, you will want to keep it in your dock, where it will be readily available.
Step 2

No window or interface appears, when you open the Grab Application. The application will show on the menu at the top of your screen. The Capture pull down menu will be the menu you will use most of the time. But first we will set up your preferences.
Step 3

With Grab open, pull down File menu and choose 'Preferences'. A small window will open offering you several cursor choices. The default is set at none, this means your cursor arrow will not appear in screens shots. If you are taking how-to screen shots, you will want a cursor to appear, so choose one now. This will appear in each grab until you change the settings.
Step 4

Timed Screen Shot

You will notice in the Capture pull down menu, there are four choices. In the first three, you will discover some things on your screen will not appear. Many application menus will not appear or live actions. In the image accompanying this step, I wanted the image to show me dragging the map into the new window, so I chose 'Timed Screen', after starting timer I performed the action, stopping where I wanted and holding until photo was taken. You will want to play with this option to become completely familiar.
Step 5

Grab Window Screen Shot

Often you will only need a screen shot of a window on your screen. When you choose 'Grab Window' a dialogue box will open asking you to choose a window. After clicking okay, the next window you click on will be grabbed.

Here, I wanted to take a screen shot after I moved Texas away from the map.
Step 6

Grab Selection Screen Shot

What if you do not want the entire window? What if you want more than one window or a portion of your desktop? Then you will choose 'Grab Selection' from the capture menu. Simply choose a corner of the area you want to grab and drag your mouse to take in the area you want. As soon as you release your mouse, the shot is taken.

Here, I only wanted to show how I had enlarged Texas and added a star for Austin's location.
Step 7

Organize Files

Here are all my grabbed files, saved into a folder on my desktop. As long as you do not close any windows without saving, you can save and name your files after taking all the screen shots or save and close each as you go along.
Step 8

Import into iPhoto

Open iPhoto and under File, choose 'Import'. A dialogue box will open and you can navigate to the folder you created containing your screen shots. You may choose the folder of the contents or a selection from the folder.

After files are imported, now is the perfect time to write a Title for each screen shot, this will help you organize your files later.
Step 9

Choose Edit

Create an Album for the project and drag the imported screen shots into the new album. Organizing by project will make things easier if you need to make additional screen shots or re-grab others for a better view.

Inside the Album, choose Edit and a series of thumbnails will open. You will want to do a few things to your images in edit. Crop will reduce the screen shot to the area you need. Effects or Enhance will correct sharpness and quality.
Step 10

Crop and Optimize Screen Shots

As noted earlier, in step 4, you may need to take a timed screen shot of the entire screen to get a dialogue box to appear. Of course, you only need the dialogue box, so you will need to crop it from the background. You should use the crop function to show only what you need to help your reader follow your instructions, rather than search the image for your example.

You may want to sharpen or enhance some images after cropping. This is the time to do it.
Step 11

Export Images

You may have noticed that your screen shots are in TIFF format and while this format works in emails and word processing, it is not the correct format for the Internet. Also, these files are very large! File size is the main reason many web pages take forever to load.

The export function allows you to convert your images into JPEGs and allows you the ability to reduce size of image and file size. When the export dialogue box appears, choose File Export and then choose:
- Kind: JPEG,
- JPEG Quality: Medium
- Size: Small
- File Name: Use title
Click on Export and Choose a Folder to export your images, I chose the same folder and later created a new folder for the original TIFFs to clean up.
Step 12

Compare File Sizes

I sorted this window by file kind to separate the TIFFs from JEPGs, notice the reduction in size! The full size screen shots were over a Mega Byte! and the final file was only 24kb!

Many web sites you will upload your images into may contain lots of advertising. Each Ad has a file size and it adds to the time it takes for the page to open. You have no control over this but you do have control over the size of the images you add, so keep them small!