Spaz's Guide to Mass Screencapping

[Spaz]

At the time of this post, I've screencapped somewhere north of 30,000 images to Fembot Wiki over the course of roughly 7-8 years (Plus about 20,000+ on another wiki-farm). In that time, I've also noticed others who have screencapped things, but they tend to make a few errors that can reduce the efficiency of uploading and properly displaying multiple images. Here's a few pointers from me:

• #1: Rename the file names of each image from the default, really ridiculously long name to preferably something short and simple so it's easy to post and edit onto a page. FYI, the TAB button is your best friend during this process. Examples:
  **A multi-episode TV series, like Andromeda, name the file Rommie, after the nickname of the fembot, then Rommie 1.1-7 for season 1, episode 1, image 7.
  **A film or one off video, name the file after the name of the fembot, or a key word from the title. Uncanny 1.jpg, for example.
  #2: Once you have the filename, it's faster to add say 156 images to a page by posting Rommie .jpg ten times, then adding 1-0 to each one, then copying and pasting those ten as many times as needed and adding the missing numbers.
  #3: The wiki can sometimes be glitchy, so upload the images first, then add the info to the pages.
  #4: Due to the occasional glitchiness, try not to add everything at once...do it in stages.
  #5: Try and listen to some music, because this entire process can be very tedious.

[--NightBattery--]

[FaceoffFembot]

http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php

[33cl33]

I also love this free tool for bulk renaming, and bulk image tweaking/resizing
http://www.faststone.org/FSResizerDetail.htm

[Chemik]

Well, anything like bulk operations involving file renaming (say, according to EXIF data), resizing, etc., is very easily handled by bash scripts in Linux, via standard

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
num=0
title=movie_title
for file in shot*; do
   ((num++))
   ext=${file##*.}
   new_file="$title$(printf "%02d" "$num").$ext"
   mv -iv "$file" "$new_file"
done

For me the most cumbersome part of the process is the images reviewing/sorting so that they create a nice flow of events and the redundancy is reduced to a minimum. I often swap the images so that screens don't actually follow their times in the movie so that the resulting gallery is more logical. The screen creation date doesn't help here at all since sometimes I need to go back in the movie to add some screens which I missed in the first go. For some time I used the option

screenshot-template=shot%wH%wM%wS%wT

in mpv.conf for mpv (which I use for screencapping) so that I could add the screens and they would fit into the old set, but then it's actually more difficult to sort images as their names have ridiculously long numbers, so now I stick with the standard mpv screen numbering. However, I can't imagine how I could do anything (not just screen work) without a command line.

The screens have to end with increasing numbers, however, it's a good idea to format them so that each number contains the same number of digits, e.g. if there are > 9 and < 100 screens, we need 2 digits: 01, 02, ..., 90, 91 - so that when downloaded, they are always displayed in the intended order. Of course sorting can be changed (ll -v in Linux will sort them so that 1 comes before 10), naming them this way makes the order stay the same for virtually all image viewers. This is also very easily done in Linux using the "printf" command in the script.