Found Image Feature Suggestions

[anthonystauffer]

I use the "Found Image" in almost every macro, and there's a few features that would save me a lot of time when building macros.

1. Screen Capture. Give me the option to grab a portion of the screen right from within the action editor. Instead of use the system screen capture, then save the image, locate it, and drag it onto the square, imagine how fast it could be if I could just click a button, have the rectangular marquee selection tool come up, and have the captured image go directly into the action. No saving, finding, dragging.

2. Allow me to open a file selection dialog right from the "Found Image" action to browse for an image instead of having to drag it there.

These two features would greatly speed up building of macros that use lots of "Found Image" triggers.

[hemicyon]

I use the macOS ⌘⇧⌃4 keyboard shortcut to save the screenshot directly to the system clipboard, then paste it with ⌘V into the image well for the KM action. This is pretty speedy for me. This method is also generally the more reliable for KM to find the image. The wiki page has more details https://wiki.keyboardmaestro.com/Found_Image

[anthonystauffer]

Whoa, I had no idea you could paste from the clipboard into the image well. Well that solves that.

[devoy]

Bear in mind though that pasting enough images directly into these actions will bloat your macros file.

It's a little more work, but I save all of my "found images" into external files and reference those from the action.

[noisneil]

@devoy

It's a little more work

There's a macro for that...

Macro: Extract Found Image Image and Replace with Path

I've managed to remove the need for Preview by using the Write to a File action instead. Much neater. This creates a folder in a parent directory ("Found Images" in this case), named according to the currently selected macro. Fortunately, subsequent runs within the same macro appear to add images to this folder rather than create it anew. I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth! It then saves the image selected in KM as a .png and names it according to the action name and action ID. This is …

[justthere]

I’m not sure if it would make things more cumbersome, but… I had an issue with being able to find an image on a screen where the text and the background were not too far apart in color - low contrast - so I adjusted the contrast in the image I added to search for and that fixed it. So might be nice to have some simple processing tools present for the image in a pop up or something.

[skillet]

@anthonystauffer

Whoa, I had no idea you could paste from the clipboard into the image well. Well that solves that.

There is a whole slew of these that have been here since OS8 or 9 that haven't changes. When they first went to OSX they were missing but came back right away. Control+command+shift+4 is so engranded my fingers at this point with another shortcut I do on average a dozen or so times a day.

I don't know when Windows "Was snuck into these shortcuts" but just noticed that when I took a screenshot.

Enhanced Screenshot

Enhanced Screenshot This is so far my ultimate Screenshot macro. Unlike the Set Screenshots Destination macro this one works independently of the system’s ⇧⌘3 and ⇧⌘4 screenshots. (And does a lot more than setting the screenshots folder.) This macro is a combined GUI for three command line tools: screencapture – part of OS X pngquant – a quantization tool for PNGs advpng – a PNG compressor/optimizer The pngquant and advpng parts of the macro are streamlined subsets from my PNG Optimizer …

System > Keyboard Shortcuts

Screenshot Shortcuts (364 KB)

@devoy

It's a little more work, but I save all of my "found images" into external files and reference those from the action.

I'd love to see an example macro. It sounds like from Peter's replies that it will break syncing macros.

Macro: Extract Found Image Image and Replace with Path

Not at all. There's plenty of users here who have much larger plist files. Mine used to be over 9MB before I replaced all my found images from embedded images to image file paths.

There's a macro for that...
[/quote]

Thanks for sharing.