Preferences

The preference dialog box allows you to individualize Screen Catcher to better meet your needs.  Begin by choosing Preferences… from the Edit menu to access the preferences dialog shown below.

 
























Hotkeys

Though screen snapshots can be taken anytime using the commands in Screen Catcher's Capture menu, a far more convenient method of capturing images is to set up hotkeys that will allow you to take a snapshot from within any application.   Separate hotkeys are used for the three different selection modes: Region, Window, and Screen (see the "Capture Menu" chapter for more details about these modes).

To set a hotkey, simply click the appropriate Set button, then press the key combination you'd like to use as the hotkey.  After you've launched Screen Catcher (or after startup, if you have the Screen Catcher Extension installed), just press one of the key combinations to capture an image from your screen.


Options for "Copy URL"

The Copy URL command in the Edit menu copies an URL for an image after it has been saved to disk.  The URL is formatted as follows:

     <IMG="BASE_URLfilename" WIDTH=XXX HEIGHT=XXX ALT="">

where BASE_URL is the text entered into the box shown in the preferences dialog above.  If you keep images in a separate directory on your web server, place the absolute or relative path to this directory in the Base URL box.  If you prefer to just have the image file's name listed in the URL, leave the box empty.


Keeping Images in Memory

Screen Catcher does its best to keep its RAM usage to a minimum, but images can take up quite a bit of memory.  If you have more than one image window open at once, you can save memory by turning off the Keep all images in memory checkbox.  

When this option is turned off, Screen Catcher will keep only the image in its frontmost window in memory.  The contents of the remaining windows will be written to your system disk and read back only when Screen Catcher redraws these windows.

To get an idea of how much memory this may save, use the Get Info command from the Image menu to look at the memory size of the image in each open window.  The "when active" number indicates how much memory the image will occupy in memory when its window is frontmost, while the "when inactive" figure indicates how much memory is necessary for Screen Catcher to update the window by reading the image data from a temporary file on the hard disk.

Since accessing a hard disk is slower than accessing RAM, turning off the Keep all images in memory checkbox will slow down window redrawing slightly for all but the frontmost window.   On newer PowerMacs, this delay is insignificant.  On slower Macintoshes, you may wish to keep all images loaded in memory to improve performance.