Capturing and Renaming for Free

You don’t have to spend money to get some automation with screenshots happening on your Mac. Use the built-in commands to create the captures and then you can use an application called Tiny App to do the renaming. Tiny app lives in the menu bar and just looks out for whenever you use the standard hotkeys to do a capture of the screen or a selection to a file. Wake up all the application does is to rename the file from the capture to something that will make sense. It blames the file after the application at the forefront when you captured, followed by the name of the file being worked on, the words Screen Shot are added followed by the date and time.

There are some options in the preferences to set up the file naming in different ways. It only gives you the options of long medium and short for the date and time formats. It’s not as good as using Hazel to do the renaming. Hazel allows you to have the order of the year, month, day whichever way you want it. Hazel is also worth having because it will move files placed on to the desktop or whatever folder you have it watching to your special place for screen captures. One handy option is to have quick look launched for the screen capture. You’ll be able to check that your screen capture is just right and you’ll see a button to open up the screen capture in Preview where you can make further adjustments with cropping, text and other markup if you wish. Preview is an underused and underestimated stock application from Apple you’ll find on your Mac. It’s well worth having a look at what you can do with it so you can make better use of it.