The Screenshot Game

One of the things that I take fairly seriously is screenshots. I find them to be terribly useful ways to break up large blocks of text, and as such I try to generally place one at least every other paragraph. The challenge with this means that I need an awful lot of them to make it work. Since I write my posts first thing in the morning and on a fairly limited time schedule, it also means that I need them to be somewhat organized so that I can get the right one at the right time. As such this morning I thought I would talk a little bit about my routine, and how I go about managing images.

The Tools

I largely find myself relying upon two different tools to capture all of the images that you see. The reason why I have multiple is because occasionally certain games do not like being captured by certain tools. The unfortunate bit about duplicating your effort is that there will occasionally be situations where an image has been captured in multiple locations… and when you are recording 4k images like I am this leads to a bit of clean up and reconciliation after the fact.

The first tool in my toolkit is DxTory by ExKode which is a little piece of software that does exactly one thing… record screenshots and images of Direct X windows. For years I used Fraps, but more recently Windows 10 started causing issues with it forcing me to fall back on another product. Most of these tools are payware and not share/freeware but in the case of DxTory it is a reasonable one time purchase of 3800 yen or roughly $35 at the current exchange rate. For this you get a key that will then allow you to effectively register copies effectively forever. The things that I like the most about DxTory is how generally lightweight it is and how good the output looks. As such I generally use this as my primary tool for capturing video and even use it to capture consoles since I play those through my Elgato Pro card.

My backup is configuring GeForce Experience which offers the ability to capture images at a hardware level… as such bypassing lockouts like the one Destiny 2 tried to put into place. Since it is pulling your data at a driver level, in theory there should never be a game that can somehow block this from recording. The negative about all of this is that it is a little flaky and if I leave my system up and running without a reboot for too long it just stops responding at all. It has a neat feature where it dumps games into a directory named after whatever game you happen to be playing. The gotcha there is this only works if you are playing it in full screen, and otherwise it just dumps everything into a directory called “Desktop” with a bajillion images that are all named Desktop with a timestamp tacked onto the end.

The Storage Scheme

The problem with screenshots is that they get stranded all over your harddrive if you allow the default tool for each game to capture them. Initially my goal was simply to collect them in a single location and I personally chose “Gameshots” as a directory name on my bulk mechanical storage drive. I went through the process of pointing everything to this one directory, but occasionally would encounter a game that would not allow me to configure where the screenshots were saved. It is around this point that I started a new strategy of relying entirely upon a third party image capture software and disabling the default screenshot functionality within each game.

Effectively I have two directories that matter in this scenario:

• Working Gameshots Directory – these are fresh images that I am capturing on a nightly basis and are generally going to be what I am most likely to be writing about. The above screenshot shows various folders based on games as configured by GeForce Experience. I have DxTory writing to a folder in this structure called Captures as raw screenshots need a little bit of processing that I will get into later.
• Deep Storage – Since I accumulate a lot of these images, every so often I reach a point where the windows file system becomes unwieldy when I am hunting for a specific image. As such every few months I spend an evening filing away the raw images into game based directories on my network attached storage system.

The core problem I have with my deep storage is… how exactly does one organize several hundred games worth of screenshots? I have a rough system that you can see above, but it also at times is just nonsense. Diablo 3 for example… for whatever reason when I first slotted it into the system I labelled an “Online” game and not an “MMORPG”, and I have never bothered to go back and move it. Apparently in my head there was a distinction between something that was a WoW-like and something that just happened to have online play. You also see an “FPS” directory and a “Shooter” directory and the distinction there is I am apparently using the term Shooter to describe Bullet Hell style space combat shooters.

“Miscshots” becomes any debris that happens to also collect in my gameshots directory such as clips of things that are not games when I happen to capture screenshots from a movie. “Stream” is a catch all directory for me backing up anything associated with my stream like overlays or titlecards. Then you have the ultimate lazy directory which is “ToBeSorted” which has anything that is not easily identifiable in a thumbnail or weird one-offs that I will resolve at some later date… the only problem is that later date has never actually arrived. The other directory is “nonshots” which is anything that happens to get saved to the directory that is not an image.

Conversions

The only negative about this set up so far is the fact that I am playing an awful lot of the games at 4k resolutions, which becomes extremely cumbersome to deal with. There is no way that I want to upload a 4k screenshot to my blog even though Jetpack image hosting does some chicanery and renders it in a semi-optimized format. This meant that I needed something to easily batch convert large numbers of files down to something more reasonable like 1080p, and for this I lean on a software I have used since the 90s.

IrfanView is a swiss army knife when it comes to image maintenance. First off it is one of the fastest image viewers if you simply want to page through a directory full of images looking for the one you are actually trying to find. Next up it offers a whole slew of image conversion options allowing you to shift things between formats and does a solid job of relatively lossless resizing. I have mine configured to set everything to 1080p and save the output as a jpg to drop the size down a bit more before uploading it. If you are so inclined you can even use it to OCR documents with a pretty high accuracy rate. It is completely free to use, but registering your copy is only 10 euros.

This is Madness

Before you comment… I realize this is complete madness. It however is what works for me personally. I am not suggesting anyone adopt my scheme for dealing with screenshots, but I am suggesting that you ultimately develop your own. I went down this rabbit hole because in the early days of my blog I would simply do a google image search and call it “good enough”. The problem there is you wind up with results of varying quality and all manner of sizes. I began to obsess about making sure that I had plenty of screenshots so that I would never have to do this last minute hunt ever again.

The end result works for me, and helps ease my mind… that if I absolutely need to find a screenshot from the opening of Guild Wars 2 I know I can with a moments notice. The other nice side effect is that keeping my screenshots organized also gives me a way of seeing exactly what games I happened to be playing during a given block of time. This has given me fodder for another side project of mine which is keeping track of what games I played during which months in a given year. That admittedly is also madness, but whatever… it makes me happy.