I'm currently upgrading the Console documentation for Microsoft Edge and I needed to create a lot of screenshots for it. I wanted to make sure that they all are the same size, so I fixed a browser window to a certain size and instead of trying to screenshot a part of the screen, I thought it wiser to take full window screenshots. You do this by pressing CMD + Shift + 4, move your mouse on the window you want to take a screenshot of and press Space to save it to your Desktop.
MacOS by default ads a gorgeous drop shadow on any windows and puts some padding around it.
I wanted to get rid of that and the browser Chrome. The final result should be something like this:
So I tried to find a way to crop all the screenshots I have taken in a batch process using Automator. Turns out it can crop, but only from the centre. What I needed was a way to say "crop a rectangle of sx by sy from the image starting at x and y". The solution was the Swiss army knife of images, ImageMagick. After installing it (via Homebrew), I was able to crop part of an image and create a new one on Terminal using the following syntax (with the bits in {} being the values):
convert sourceimage.png -crop {width}x{height}+{left}+{top} resultimage.png
I created a folder called nochrome on my Desktop and wrote this small shell script to batch convert all of them:
for filename in *.png; do\
convert $filename -crop 1842x918+123+234 "nochrome/$filename"
echo "$filename done"
done
There are probably easier ways, but that did the trick for me.
Top comments (2)
Nice trick! If you're looking for an easier way, I use
CMD+Shift+5to "Capture Selected Portion". I can select the portion of the screen I want and use that. The selection remains between screenshots. Added bonus, it also remains for screen recordings as well, it's what I usually use for the #DevToolsAdventNice thing. I've always limited my use of ImageMagick to only wrappers but it can be used as a shell command.