Crop your screenshots to only include the relevant content before sharing. It makes the intent clearer for the receiver and prevents accidentally leaking information (e.g. browser tabs). The only reason to send a full desktop screenshot is if there's something to point out about your entire desktop.
Almost every OS comes with built in cropping for screenshots, and failing that there's plenty of great third-party tools. At the very least, screenshot a window instead of the entire screen.
Other assorted tips:
- Keep a small margin around any text or important elements.
- Fully include or exclude elements, don't keep half a line of text. It's distracting.
- Disable or move the mouse pointer out of frame (when applicable).
- Avoid particularly wide or narrow screenshots. They're difficult to view on mobile and incomprehensible in square previews. For long text, narrow your window or zoom so that the text wraps into a squarer shape.
- Prefer zooming before the screenshot to get a higher resolution image instead of cropping after. Some platforms behave weirdly on low resolution images and try to upscale them, to questionable results.
- Rew
Nightly Notes
Having through half a dozen screenshot tools on various platforms, I can now say with confidence that nothing matters except speed. There are few cases where the literal pixels on your screen are the important information.
I screenshot because it's the fastest way to communicate what I want. If it was something which warranted slower speed, I would use a higher quality method. Copy the text, download the relevant link/file, or render an image directly instead of relying on how my screen happens to look.
Speaking of which, this post should probably have images, but I haven't added them before and I don't intend to start now. I'm not breaking my writing streak to fiddle with additional complexity.
Maybe another time,
- Rew