CleanGrab - Screengrabs in Leopard

October 29, 2007

Last night I griped about Leopard’s inclusion of the window drop-shadow when doing screengrabs. Despite my self-involved behavior, I still believe that most people would prefer no background with their application window screenshots. Could I be wrong? Sure. But I don’t think I am.

You have many choices when creating screengrabs in OS X. You could use the built-in functionality or use one of the many third party applications available. In the interest of not having to run yet another application, I threw together (and I mean that almost literally) a quick ‘n’ dirty script that will create screengrabs of just the select window, sans background. While I do poke fun at “flynn”, a commentor, I thank him for informing me of the command and flags needed to do this.

You can download the script here: CleanGrab.zip (4 KB)

There are probably hundreds of way to do this — some better, maybe even a few worse. This way works well for me and should for you, too. If you have any improvements, suggestions or want to call me names, please do so in the comments. I’m throwing this out there to help others and take no responsibility if this scripts eats your homework or causes your cat to fall from a third-story window. But, really, it’s so simple that it should just work.

Instructions:

1. Copy the CleanGrab.scpt file to your user scripts folder, ~/Library/Scripts.


2. Open the file in Script Editor and edit as needed. The default save location is your Desktop and the file name is Picture + the PID. Feel free to change the format, as well. Default format is PNG.
   
3. Use tools like Quicksilver or FastScripts Lite (both free!) to trigger the script with a key combo. They both work equally as good, just your preference.

Comments

1. Garrett Murray — October 29, 2007 at 6:51:21

   

   Nice work!
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2. Tom Watson — October 29, 2007 at 7:00:12

   

   Nice.  Glad to see there’s an alternative already.

3. ~Phi — October 29, 2007 at 9:10:41

   

   Impressive young Jedi!

4. Scott Boms — October 29, 2007 at 9:48:31

   

   Thank you sir. Glad to not have to resort to other means of screengrabbing.

5. Scott Boms — October 30, 2007 at 2:56:59

   

   Did you notice that using the Grab app (in Utilities) to take a window screen does not result in a screenshot with the window drop shadow? Just a heads up.

6. Ryan — October 31, 2007 at 8:50:16

   

   Scott, I did explore using the Grab app, but found it cumbersome and it required I open another app, so I ditched it. :)

7. aptmunich — November 07, 2007 at 9:53:59

   

   Great! I need to print screenshots of my terminal window for my cs class (don’t ask), and the background shadow show up as a grey blob on monochrome laserjet printers.

   This’ll do the job nicely! Thanks!

8. Doug Adams — November 08, 2007 at 6:17:41

   

   Excellent!

9. Jason — April 15, 2008 at 9:49:08

   

   Thank you very much for such a useful little script.  It solves a huge screen-grabbing annoyance for me.  =)

Orange you glad you have an opinion?