This mornings post is going to be a bit of a descent into my madness. One of the things you will have no doubt noticed by now on my blog is that I post a lot of screenshots. It has become a bit of an obsession to have a decent workflow for taking a screenshot from a moment in a game to a properly sized image ready for posting. One of the problems I have encountered over the years is that every single game seems to want to store its screenshots in a different arcane location. While there are websites like the PC Gaming Wiki that can help you decode this nonsense, there are even more games that have no built in screenshot functionality.
My desire is to ultimately have every screenshot that I take land in a single incoming directory, where I can then process and eventually (often times months and months later) sort it into my long network storage. I need to reorganize but I have some rough break downs by game type and then store my images in a directory loosely named off of the game title. The benefit of this is that I can rapidly pull back a screenshot for a game that I have not been playing in ages if I end up needing/wanting to talk about it again. I play an excessive number of games so having some sort of a system helps greatly in trying to decipher this mess.
For years… and I do mean like a decade or so… I used FRAPS. It was the swiss army knife of PC screenshotting tools, and was relatively lightweight in a sort of set it and forget it manner. I configured it to dump into my “gameshots” directory and the rest was history. I could reclaim the fruits of my labor from that location and then convert them as needed for the purpose of the blog. The core problem with this is that FRAPS and Beepa the company behind it… are effectively defunct. Sure you can still purchase licenses for it, but it has not been updated since 2013 and has had a slew of issues starting with Windows 8.1 and continuing with Windows 10.
This lead me down a path that ultimately lead to DXtory at the suggestion of a friend. This application works fairly well… except when it doesn’t and for whatever reason keeps your game from even launching. Anthem for example… will not launch while DXtory is running and I am guessing this has something to do with the way that it is hooking into Direct X as an overlay and it being detected by Anti-Cheat software as somewhat of an aberration. The other issue that I would occasionally run into with DXTory is that it would just stop working out of the blue, and would not start working again until I rebooted. The final nail in the coffin unfortunately is once again DXtory seems to be a bit of an abandonware project given that the last update was in 2017 and the game has numerous unresolved issues.
Another tool that I have used quite a bit is GeForce Experience and its in-game overlay which provides access to taking screenshots and video. This works when it works… and stops working seemingly randomly. There are games that this will capture like a champ, and it has the added benefit of dumping them into a directory named after the information in the games executable. However it was unreliable enough that there were many nights where I thought I was capturing all of this content for the blog… and then get out of the game only to realize I got nothing. Additionally this does not play nicely with Parsec all of the time, which lead to some weirdness that could occasionally cause me to lose mouse input controls while remoted into my upstairs machine.
Greenshot is an open source screenshotting tool that seemed promising. However it has a massive flaw that ultimately drove me away from it. There were many a night when I would be humming along taking screenshots, only to realize later that for whatever reason it was not capturing the game but instead just picture after picture of my desktop. This caused a rapid uninstall and a retreat back into other tools.
Steam has a perfectly cromulent Screenshot functionality, that seems to work flawlessly. It has two fatal flaws as far as I am concerned. The first being that you cannot change where the screenshots are stored and they are stored in a truly arcane path that I die inside a little bit each time I remember that I have memorized it. “Steam\userdata\8795056\760\remote\1085660\screenshots” for example is the directory for Destiny 2, which is a game that is notoriously hard to nab screenshots from with a third party tool. The only bit that is unique to Destiny is the “1085660” which I believe is some kind of Steam Catalog Identifier. I’ve had to rely on this for Destiny for awhile given that neither Fraps nor DXTory were capable of pulling a screenshot. The final flaw however is the fact that this only works for games running under Steam… which is not a case for every game I play.
When I shared this lament with folks online… the almost universal refrain was “What about OBS?”. The thing is… I don’t want to capture video. OBS is my go to for any time I want to capture footage or that I might want to stream, and I use it at work for manipulating my web cam before piping it through video conference software. The problem for me at least is that while OBS does support screenshot functionality, it feels like a lot of overhead to be running this window of OBS that is constantly mirroring my screen just to be recording a still. Then there is the problem with Medal or any of the other “record clips” apps, that they are really focused on live video. Pulling a still from video is messy and often times ends up with anything that was in action being blurred as a result because video doesn’t record full single frames but instead a mishmash that visually works in motion.
Where we have ended up is another piece of software that a friend suggested. ShareX, like Greenshot is also an OpenSource project but it seems to be designed around capturing anything you might want to capture. It has a whole workflow system, which I have only barely scratched and was seemingly designed for the purpose of taking an image and then uploading image to some external host. I am not doing that second part, but I am wondering if I can eventually script it so that it does my entire workflow. Right now I have everything dumping into a single directory, but it seems like I could pretty easily recreate the functionality that GeForce Experience did and name things based on the executable information. So far it “just works” and it has even managed to flawlessly capture Destiny 2, with the caveat being that you have to be running it as Administrator or some games seem to block it.
I’ve been using it for about a week now and everything that I have attempted to capture has been great without any weirdness that I have encountered thusfar. I am hoping that I might have a winner here, and pending that I do I will happily start contributing to the Patreon as a way of funding this thing that is seemingly really hard to find. I have zero qualms supporting the things I used and had licenses to FRAPS, DXTory and even the thing I am going to talk about next… IrfanView. Ultimately I need to dig into the workflow scripting because once I get an image in the incoming directory, that isn’t the end of the process.
I’ve used IrfanView since college for batch image processing, and before that I used something called Graphics Workshop. IrfanView is this awesome one size fits all image viewer software that has plugins to support all sorts of esoteric other formats. The final step before an image ends up on my blog is to run it through a batch conversion where it makes sure the size constrains to at least 1920×1080 (it ignores anything smaller) and then converts it to a JPG to reduce the size. My native resolution is 3840×2160 aka “4k” and I have no interest in posting something that large on my blog. However I do like storing the original image capture for any future needs down the line. As a result I everything gets run through IrfanView which also moves the screenshot to its final resting place signifying that it is ready to post on the blog.
I am hoping that ShareX stays with me for awhile. So far I have yet to encounter a game that it would not capture. I need to spend some time learning about its functionality because I am using it for only a fraction of what it seems to be able to do. If it could replace my entire workflow it would be phenomenal, so that it could save a copy in Full Resolution and then send a scaled down copy to my working directory as well. I know this is probably madness but I feel like it is useful every so often to peel back the curtain and talk about how I approach things.
I generally use the game’s in-built so long as it’s possible to take screenshots reliably and with the option of with and without UI. Otherwise I’ve so far managed to get by with the Windows Game bar version, that works for me even in cinematics where a game’s in-built facility is disabled.
I use the windows inbuilt game bar screenshot settings which is not ideal by a long shot because if you spam it (i.e. WoW cinematics where the normal screenshot system doesn’t work) it gets an error and stops working which means a PC reboot. However, like yourself I’ve been through all the options. You’ve got a few here that I’ve not tried but I also found that GeForce Experience wasn’t ideal (I can’t remember why exactly) and Fraps no longer works at all for me. At least with the Windows game bar I know what the pitfalls are and I can work around it.
I didn’t know it was possible to get a license to Irfanview.
Still on dxtory here, and I probably will be until I find something else that can take periodic screenshots. I like that functionality for getting screenshots of action without me having to worry about hitting a button while frantically hitting other buttons.
I mean I donated money and on the about page it is licensed to “YOU” so I am calling it close enough 😛
I still use FRAPS and I haven’t had any issues with it under Win10. I only use it when the native screenshot function of the game itself is too annoying (or absent). From preference I always use the facility the game gives me but that does often lead to a lengthy search to find out where the screenshots are being stored. Once I know that, if I think I’m going to need to find them again and won’t remember I drop a link to the location onto my desktop. Usually it’s not necessary, though. I can mostly remember where they are.
I’m using both the in-game option and FRAPS for Genshin Impact because GI’s native facility is great for posed shots but useless for just about anything else. It’s incredibly annoying that there’s a) no key re-assignment and b) no HideUI function sperate from the posed shot function. It means no action or travel shots without the UI and I take a lot of those in most games. I’m hoping they add key assignment eventually and include hiding the UI in the options.
For me Fraps causes this big ugly red performed an illegal operation box from windows when it tries to load. In 2016 there was a post floating around saying it was being updated to support Windows 10, DirectX 12 and Vulkan and far as I can tell that patch never happened.