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Creating Thumbnails of Screenshots

Using SnagIt, you can resize a screenshot into a smaller, thumbnail-sized image. This is helpful for placing images on the Web you can save download time by showing a smaller image that links to the original (larger) image. Thumbnails are also helpful for printing several small versions of images per page, for example, to use in a sales catalog of art pieces.

People also commonly use thumbnails to:

• decide which image captures are needed for a current project
• proof their captures
• share many images at once
• create a pictorial entry to an HTML link

If you know you want to create a thumbnail from a screenshot, you should save your original capture as a .bmp file, because .bmp files preserve the best image quality. Then, resize the picture in the SnagIt Editor.

The more you scale an image, the greater the degradation of the image quality, because scaling removes sections (pixels) of the image to make it smaller. SnagIt can partially compensate for this effect with its Smooth Scaling feature. This option blends the colors of adjacent pixels to "fill in" the holes left from scaling.

Creating a Thumbnail from a Screenshot

1. Use SnagIt to take a screenshot of the capture, and save it as a .bmp file.

2. Open your capture in the SnagIt Editor window.

3. Choose Image > Scale and place a check mark next to Smooth Scaling.

4. Choose one of the scaling methods:
   Scale by Percentage: Choose Image > Scale and choose the desired percentage from the fly-out menu. You might even combine several steps of scaling by repeating this process with different percentages.
   Custom Scaling: Choose Image > Scale > Custom Scale.

5. The Scale dialog box is displayed.
   

6. Select Scale to width and height and set the desired size. Thumbnails are generally 128 x 128 pixels in size. Enable Keep aspect ratio if you do not want to stretch the thumbnail image. If you want to the image to be of a specific width and height, you have to disable Keep aspect ratio to stretch the thumbnail image.

7. Save the file in the appropriate format. The file format you choose depends on the nature of the thumbnail. Choose the smallest file size that is still of acceptable image quality:
   If it's a screenshot, save the file as a .gif.
   If it's a photograph, save it as a .jpeg.

If you're going to use the thumbnail on the Web, choose Tools > Color Depth and select 64 or fewer colors. However, be sure to choose the Identity Palette, which has all the colors of a "normal" desktop and black and white built in. Choose None for the Dithering Method.

Creating Thumbnails Using Batch Conversion

You can also use the Batch Conversion feature in SnagIt's Catalog Browser to easily create thumbnails of hundreds of images. Follow these five easy steps:

1. Choose Tools > Catalog Browser from the SnagIt menu bar to launch SnagIt's Catalog Browser.

2. Within the Catalog Browser, navigate to the folder containing the images that you want to make thumbnails of. Select the desired images.

3. Choose Tools > Conversion Filters > Image Scaling > Custom Scale menu option to set the thumbnails to an equal size.

4. Select Scale to width and height and then set the thumbnail image width and height (128 x 128 pixels).

5. Disable Keep aspect ratio to stretch the thumbnail images so that they are all the same size (e.g., each thumbnail image is 128 x 128 pixels).

6. Use the Tools > Convert Selected Images menu option to create the thumbnail images.

7. Select a Copy to folder in which to store the images.

8. Select the file type for the thumbnail images using the Save images as type listbox (remember, .gif for screenshots, .jpeg for photos).

9. Click OK to start the conversion process.

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