snagit-profiles1I recently wrote an article about how you could increase your productivity by using the Quick Access Toolbar in Snagit Editor more effectively.

That tip showed how you could increase speed when editing your Snagit screen shots. In today’s tip I’m going to cover another great productivity enhancer that takes place before you capture your screen – the Snagit Profiles.

Snagit boasts over 40 ways to capture the screen and the possibilies of altering your outputs and adding effects ends up with virtually an infinite number of ways to take and save your captures.

The purpose of the Snagit Profiles is to create pre-made capture modes so you can handle your captures the exact same way over and over. Thus increasing your productivity.


A real world example of using Snagit Profiles as time saver

Let me describe a real world example where using the Snagit Profiles can have a huge impact on productivity. My wife often scans document to keep a digital copy instead of wasting paper by doing real paper copies.

This process involves a lot of steps from placing the paper on the scanner bed, starting the scanner software, start the scan, choose format, open folders to save it, choose name, save the file and finally close all the folders down again.

To save all this time I set up a Snagit Profile for her. I dedicated a button [F2] on her computer that does almost all of these steps. She still needs to put the paper on the scanner but we hope Snagit will fix this in a future release 😉


How to set up a Snagit time saver Profile

Let’s say that you want to set up a profile with a Region capture, that automatically is resized to 50% saved in PNG format with a preformatted name on the file. Here’s how to do it.

Step 1 Input) Go down to Profile Settings Input field and choose Region.

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Step 2 Effects) Choose Effects / Image Scaling 50%.

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Step 3 Output – File Format) Choose Output / Properties.

To set the file format, choose Always use this file format to PNG.

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Step 4 Output – File name) To set an automatic file name and choose Options. Here you can add from a lot of different file components and you’ll see an example of how the actual filename will look. For this example I wanted my wifes initials BD so I set that as prefix text, I wanted the number of the file, automatic number, date and time (by using system date and system time).

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You also may want to choose the folder where it should be saved unless you have done this before.

When you are done creating the profile you need to save it.  Click the green plus symbol and choose Save As New Profile.

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Voila, you have your own personal custom Snagit Profile. But don’t stop there… Be sure to set up Profiles for all your usual Snagit tasks.

Please comment below what you think of this tip or if you have other Snagit productivity boosters. I’d love to hear about.

Until next time 😉

Peter – Your Snagit Guide