I realize that Evernote has its own clipper tool, but I’ve been using SnagIt’s screen capture for a long time, and it has some features that Evernote doesn’t. With SnagIt, I can markup graphics before I save them, adding text or cropping or stamping them. It’s very handy at what it does well, just as Evernote is great for organizing captures and making them searchable.
So my goal was to make it so that I could capture things directly from SnagIt to Evernote in a “single step”. No cutting and pasting, in other words. Those who know me know that I do not accept cheese, and wouldn’t compromise with some kludgy hack. Here’s how I did it, and where I’d like to improve it.
Step 1 - Open the Capture Profile
I’m using SnagIt 9.1, which is a recent (to me) upgrade, but I think that this should still work in SnagIt 9.0 if you have that version. Open the SnagIt window (not the Editor) by double-clicking it’s icon in the tray.
Step 2 - Set the Output to Program
In the Profile Settings area at the bottom, click on the Output icon to show a menu. This menu lets you set the output you want to happen by default when you capture. If you set this to something other than “None”, then every time you capture, SnagIt will so something with the capture, like save it to disk or send it in email. I don’t usually do this, electing instead to send my captures manually from the editor. I mention this feature now because if you set “Program” as the active output from this menu, you can reduce the effort of delivering your captures to Evernote even more. This isn’t necessary though, since you can still manually send your captures to Evernote from the editor Window.
Anyway, we need this window open to access the output properties. Choose Properties from that menu and a new window will appear to let you set the properties of each of those outputs.
Step 3 - Configure the Program settings
In this window, there are a set of tabs, and on the Program tab you can configure the programs that you would like to interact with from SnagIt. You can see in my screenshot that I’ve already added Evernote to the list.
Below the program listing is a setting for generating the filename that SnagIt will use to save the capture so that it can be sent to one of the programs in that list. I have altered what my filenames look like in the screenshot, and changed the directory in which these files are saved. You don’t need to change any of this, but you may want to note where the directory is that the files are saved so that you can routinely clean them out. Evernote doesn’t need these files after they’re saved into its notebook.
To add Evernote to the listing of available programs, click on the Add button on the right.
Step 4 - Add Evernote to the Available Programs
The window that appears lets you set the program that you want to send the captured image to. In my screenshot, you can see that I’ve selected this specific program: ENScript.exe
The ENScript.exe program is made available by Evernote for programs that want to use automated systems (like this) to add new things to Evernote notebooks. The documentation for ENScript is available on Evernote’s web site.
The value for display name is obvious, but I should mention that you can specify Evernote multiple times in SnagIt’s program listing, but provide different parameters to ENScript. This would let you save directly to specific notebooks, if that’s your interest.
The parameters on this window are the tricky bit. Here’s what I used:
createNote /s “D:\Owen\Documents\Snagit2Evernote\notice.txt” /n Snagit /a “<CaptureFilename>”
The createNote is a command to ENScript to tell it I want to create a note.
The /s “D:\Owen\Documents\Snagit2Evernote\notice.txt” is the tricky bit of this whole process, I think. It had me stumped for a while, just because I was using it wrong. The /s is a flag that tells Evernote to use the following filename as the contents of the note. So you can see that I created a file at that location (it’s also in the folder I used on the previous window as the folder to capture to) called “notice.txt” that is used as the content of every note I create. In my notice.txt file, I have a bit of text that says “Added from SnagIt.” although the file could be completely blank. You must create and save this file with notepad (or some text editor, but not Word or Wordpad).
The /n Snagit tells ENScript that I want to store the new note in the notebook named “Snagit”. This is the option you want to change if you create multiple instances of the program.
The /a “<CaptureFilename>” tells ENScript to attach a file to the new note. The <CaptureFilename> part is replaced by SnagIt with the filename that it saves before it executes the ENScript program with those parameters. Don’t forget the quotes around that option, or strange things may happen, like failure.
Step 5 - Capture to Evernote
The capturing is the same as it always was. The same options apply to performing a capture, you can preview it in the editor or not, just as long as you finish the profile. If you’re using a different capture profile, you can also click the Program button from the editor to access the Evernote option. This is what I usually do, leaving my profile output set to “None”, and then choosing where I want the capture to go after I see the editor window. But if you want all of your captures to go directly to Evernote with no editing, you can configure SnagIt to do that.
This is a video of me doing a capture to Evernote:
Remaining Issues
There are a couple of little things I still don’t like about the process.
First, the console window appears when the transfer from SnagIt to Evernote takes place. I dislike that. Barring an option in SnagIt to suppress that console window, I’ll have to write a little tool that I can execute instead of executing ENScript directly that will make it so that nothing visible happens on screen. That visible flash of the console window just bothers me.
Second, the capture files all sit on the filesystem even after the transfer to Evernote is made. If I write that little tool, I can also probably have it delete the file when it’s done. That would be a bonus.
Also the notice file is a little silly. I doubt that the text in the note would be useful if it’s the same for every note. There are alternate parameters to ENScript that let you set tags on the note, so you could tag all captures from SnagIt as “snagit”, for example. There’s no good reason to have that text content there, especially if it’s static. The small tool could evaluate the image somehow and add additional information in the text of the note, but I’m not sure what that would be.
Anyway, that gets it as far as it must be, and is superior to every solution I’ve seen anywhere without needing anything extra. If I write that little tool, I’ll be sure to talk about it here.
