Automatically Scale/Covert Screenshots to Non-Retina Resolution

Doing screenshots on a Mac is simple a simple task, but if your capturing screenshots on a Retina Display Mac to use for the web you will have to shrink it before posting on you blog or sending it to others. The Retina display on the recently released Macbook pro have a 2880 x 1800 screen resolution packed in a 15.4 inch display producing clearer text deeper blacks, and astonishing image clarity. This means although you see screen elements as you would on a non-retina screen, capturing the screen will output retina resolution image which is not recommended to use for the web yet.

My first solution is to shrink it in Photoshop, then I learned that you can actually change the default save location where your Mac saves screenshots (your desktop) to any folder, and then you can use folder actions to automatically resize images saved to that folder. It’s really easy, follow the two part tutorial below.

Part 1 : Set the default screenshots location to a specified folder. (credits to OSXdaily)

1. Launch “Launch Pad”, open “others” app folder, then run “Terminal”.
2. Type the following “defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Pictures/”.
   You can change “/Pictures/” to any folder you like, I recommend using “/Pictures/Screenshots/”.
3. The type or paste “killall SystemUIServer”. This will activate the changes your set above.

Part 2 :

Create a folder action and activate it on the folder set above.

1. Launch “Launch Pad”, open “others” folder and run “Automator”.
2. Choose “Folder Action” in create document dialogue.
3. Below the record button chose a folder that you want to apply folder actions. Select “other” and browse to Pictures/Screenshots folder.
4. Now choose “Scale Images” in Actions Library under “Photos” Actions. Drag it to the workflow window. Choose “Add” when asked
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   to create a copy finder item action.

5. Change the Copy Finder Item action’s target folder by browsing to a new folder in /Pictures/Screenshots/, let’s name it /scaled/.
6. On the Scale Image action choose By Percentage and set it to 50. This will resize what ever is passed to the Screenshots folder to 50%.
7. Press Command S to save the workflow. Name it to “scale screenshots”.
8. Shout boom! and your done.

You can by the way, change the scale percentage to what ever works for you if you find 50% a little small.

Using a little Terminal command and some folder action script in automator we’re able to automatically produce a web friendly non-retina screenshots as well as preserve the original Retina Screenshots.

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