Adding Image to Research Using Screenshots

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

When I’m conducting academic research, there are some instances in which I want to take a screen shot to quickly a PDF (let’s say of a relevant table or graph), in order to come back to it later. Currently, I am taking a screen shot and then adding it to Research from my Desktop (its default destination). This is time consuming. It is possible to have any screenshots taken with Scrivener open go straight to Research, under the PDF in question?

Thank you!

2

I can’t think of a faster way of creating a picture file that is automatically imported into a particular piece of software. The Mac has two different screenshot modes with its built-in shortcuts:

  • Shift-Cmd-3 and Shift-Cmd-4 to a file, using the system settings for where to save the file and in what format. The former takes a shot of the whole screen, the latter a chosen rectangular area.
  • Adding Ctrl to either of the above shortcuts will place the screenshot on the pasteboard instead of saving it to a file. So that’s a super easy way to paste screenshots into text file and graphics programs—but it won’t help you out in easily creating a file in the Binder.

The “Grab” utility is the other route, but it doesn’t offer any help here since the result from Grab is a picture in memory, so you’d just be adding more steps since you have to save the picture yourself somewhere, first.

3

There’s a pictures service that will give you a “Capture Selection from Screen” option from the Services menu or in the context menu when the focus is in the editor with no text selection. That will let you take a screen shot and immediately inserts it into the document. You should be able to turn it on under Keyboard in the system preferences. I think it’s just part of the OS, though it might have been added by something else I installed. Worth checking, at least, since it sounds like what you’re after.

4

That’s true (I think it is just a stock OS X service, though it may need to be enabled in the Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard System Preference pane), and for that matter Ctrl-Shift-Cmd-4 (that sounds more awkward than it is, you can hold down the Ctrl key after the Shift-Cmd–4 part, it just needs to be held down when you let go of the mouse button) to snap a rectangle makes it easy to immediately paste it into a text file—either will give you a pretty fast capture into a text file.

I don’t think the service lets you snap an image file into the Binder though. You can drag that out of the text editor into the Binder, but that doesn’t really save a whole lot of effort over dragging it from the Finder, especially if you just leave the default screenshot folder open as a window to the side. And with the Finder you can always hold off importing until you have a big batch of files to drag in.

5

Oh, point. There was some brain disconnect between reading this post and then coming up with the services idea and posting. Totally skipped over the part where the OP wanted to import into research. :slight_smile: Ah well!