Free Video Tutorial: Shottr - Apple Mac, iPad & iPhone Tutorials from ScreenCastsOnline

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Tutorial Description

Shottr is an extremely powerful screenshot tool that comes at a surprisingly low cost. Whilst it has a lot of the usual tools to capture and annotate that you'd expect, it also has advanced features such as the ability to blur or completely erase areas or even just the text. It also has optical character recognition to copy text from images, and it can read QR codes for you. If you're a web or app developer, you can measure elements in screenshots, find their pixel color values, and more.

Shottr can create scrolling screenshots to capture long web pages and other long-form elements. The annotations in Shottr are pretty and somehow playful without being silly. It's filled with keyboard shortcuts to make you as efficient as you want to be in taking screenshots and annotating them.

The full tutorial covers:

  • Hotkeys [00:01:39]
  • First Screenshot [00:03:17]
  • Preview Window [00:03:59]
  • OCR & QR Code Scanner [00:05:30]
  • Pinned Screenshots [00:08:02]
  • Annotating Screenshots [00:10:25]
  • Crop/Select [00:10:36]
  • Erase/Blur Text [00:12:49]
  • Arrows & Text [00:14:38]
  • Rulers & Rectangle [00:16:31]
  • Freehand Drawing [00:17:45]
  • Highlighter [00:18:32]
  • Blur/Erase [00:18:58]
  • Spotlight [00:19:20]
  • Counter [00:20:34]
  • Oval & Line Tools [00:21:16]
  • Overlay Image [00:21:37]
  • Color Values & Image Size [00:22:20]
  • Zoom [00:24:10]
  • Scrolling Capture [00:24:49]
  • Repeat Area Capture [00:26:02]
  • Capturing Windows [00:29:03]
  • Review Preferences [00:30:11]

Show Links:

Shottr - Download

Video Tutorial Comments

(5 comments posted)

Jim Leff

One problem with Shottr is its use of a file naming convention much uglier and more confusing than the one used by Finder.

Shottr: SCR-20230728-mrol.png
Finder: Screen Shot 2023-07-28 at 6.23.53 PM.png

I've tried to find a file renaming app that will let me create a preset droplet to replace (via Regex) this:
SCR-(\d\d\d\d)(\d\d)(\d\d)-
....with this:
Screen Shot \1-\2-\3

....but none support sub pattern replacement. And it'd take fancy scripting to pull in the hour/min/sec data which is helpfully replaced by Shottr with four nonsense letters.

The more I use Shottr, the more slipshod and thoughtless the UX begins to feel, but people seem to love it.

Reply

Jean-François Brissette

Hi Jim,

You said above that “ ..but none support sub pattern replacement. And it'd take fancy scripting to pull in the hour/min/sec data which is helpfully replaced by Shottr with four nonsense letters.”

I understand Shottr’s file naming convention is not to your liking (and I will let Allison chime in case there’s a way to customize this), but if there are other features you enjoy that make you want to stick with Shottr, then this thread about renaming using Hazel’s custom tokens might interest you:

https://talk.automators.fm/t/hazel-app-rename-files-using-shell-script-not-working/10711

As far as the sub pattern replacement issue, do you mean that the renaming app you’re using doesn’t support them? I’ve found that in some apps, replacement patterns are written as “$1” instead of \1 in the replace section for your regex. (I’m thinking here about OmniFocus vs. BBEdit.)

Thanks for the comment.

Jim Leff

Thanks, Jean-François. Yes, I realize this is a natural for Hazel, but I've not yet joined that cult. This might be the impetus!

Thanks for the replacement pattern! This isn't the first time I've been caught up by BBEdit's somewhat quirky Grep implementation. Someone ought to produce a glossary translating BBEdit Grep to the wider world's regex!

Jim Leff

Huh. Turns out that batch name changes can be achieved via a super obscure Finder functionality (which even lets you append the file's timestamp to its name). This posting is a gem: https://tidbits.com/2018/06/28/macos-hidden-treasures-batch-rename-items-in-the-finder/

Reply

Jim Leff

Ix-nay on the timestamp. It doesn't grab the file's creation timestamp, just a timestamp for the renaming operation. Still pretty cool.

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