Today I’m featuring my screenshot workflow.

I’ve adopted this workflow as early as January 2021, and past me wrote it all in diagrams and honestly? It's already good as-is.

Overview

I’m just going to quote past me because he’s done a good job explaining why I made it:

The primary objective is to make screenshots available across devices and to automate its entire lifecycle: keep recent ones accessible, organize older ones in monthly folders, and compress screenshots for long-term storage.

Now this workflow admittedly is heavily personalized and thus won’t work for most people (see: Caveats). But you can at least adopt the idea of having a screenshot workflow in general or even just the Hazel portions or hopefully a similar program exists for your platform.

Caveats

Some important points in mind that will be a turnoff to most people:

• Syncthing is a heavy component of this workflow — and admittedly, this process may or may not be desired depending on the user.
• Likewise, I use a Mac for my daily use, and Linux for servers, such as my Raspberry Pis and my Synology NAS. These components are also not the usual for most people (e.g., Windows users)
• The phone / mobile portion only makes sense if you’re an Android user. iOS’ tight ecosystem grip and filesystem is unappealing for third-parties like Syncthing and unfortunately won’t work. You’re either stuck with iCloud Drive or AirDrop to the Mac instead.

Workflow

Here's how it all works:

• Utility apps drive the screenshot workflow.
  • Syncthing keeps directories in sync, so some devices naturally share folders.
  • Hazel is a rules engine that “watches” directories and based on events, it does operations. Those operations are described in yellow orange, and is directly described on the screenshots.
  • Finally, Shottr makes all the screenshots nice in macOS. It’s not directly a key element in this “workflow” but it starts the captures and thus have all my annotations and crops and blurs and such.
• So what does the workflow do exactly?
  • Screenshots are moved to a “Recent” directory. They get renamed to YYYY-MM-DD for easier sorting and lookup.
  • Mobile screenshots specifically are transferred to Recent after 3 hours. This helps keep the screenshots folder clean but accessible for my Macs whenever I want them.
  • As screenshots age, they’re recompressed to WEBP and stored to the Archive.
  • Screenshots are shared between my Macs and my NAS, so that there’s a backup somewhere.
  • Archive, especially really old screenshots are only for the NAS (and my own backup policies / strategies) so drive space is reclaimed on my Macs.

So to make this yourself, you need to configure these folders on your devices and configure them with Syncthing and Hazel.

Hazel Workflows and Syncthing Directories

• 🖼️ Directory: Mobile Screenshots