How to take screenshots with watch "frame" for the store

How do you create the screenshots for the store listing? I found how to create screenshots in the simulator > File > Save screen capture menu, but that only contains the "canvas". I'd like to have the watch around it, as it is in most of the screenshots I see in Connect IQ store.

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  • With a windows screen shot and paintshop, I can have a app store ready image in a minute or two, and I'm far from an expert when it comes to paintshop.  Pretty much the same if I use my phone and take a picture of the app on the Garmin device (which I'll also use in the store for some things)

  • Jim, 

    so what you are saying is the "Save Screen Capture" of the Simulator is worthless?

    And one has to do it all manually?

    Wouldn't it make more sense if the "Save Screen Capture" produced something useful?

  • It's got it's uses, as it's an eacy way to see if you are writing to areas that are covered by the bezel.  I've used that at times.  It's also the same as if you take a screen shot on a real device.  - Square for round devices, for example.  There's an example of that earlier in the thread.

    On windows, a screen shot of the simulator window is easy.  Then I paste it into paintshop, select the area I want, paste it as a new image, and adjust the canvas so it's something like 400x400 and save it.  Like I said, a minute or two.  Less time than it took me to write this post!  Slight smile

    You can just use what you get with save screen capture in the sim, (I've done that in the past)

  • If you want to do something more than the basics, you'll have to use other tools - Animated gifs or Hero images....

  • You can just use what you get with save screen capture in the sim, (I've done that in the past)

    As previously noted, if you upload a non-square image to the store, it will be distorted on the CIQ store website, which looks terrible. (Your round watch will displayed as an oval.) This is the kind of thing where some attention to detail would be nice.

    There's a lot of apps with distorted listing images on the store, and I don't think it helps with the overall impression of CIQ. Then again, I don't know how many people actually use the store website as opposed to the CIQ app (I don't think the CIQ app has the same problem.)

    paintshop

    Honestly I recommend Paint.NET (Windows) or GIMP (Windows, macOS, Linux). Why pay for a tool to do the simple stuff that you're describing? And again, if you use the free snipping tool for Windows, it already has the ability to crop images (to be fair you can't select an aspect ratio, so you can't constrain the crop to a square). You could also use Paint if you're desperate.

  • The default Venu 2 Plus overlay is already bigger in pixels [601x911] and KBs [173KB] than that allowed for in an upload. Which means a fair amount of manipulations to arrive at something acceptable for the image upload.

    Yeah it's annoying for sure. The obvious reason for this is that the simulator wants to have a 1:1 relationship between device pixels and pixels on your dev machine.

    It's too bad that means that the simulated images for OLED watches are twice as big as those for MIP watches, and you don't really get a good sense of the relative sizes IRL. I suggested this before, but it would've been nice to have a scaled mode for the sim which could be calibrated so each simulated device has a similar size to reality. (Obviously you'd still want 1:1 pixel mode as an option.)

  • Couldn't the "Save Screen Capture" produce a 1:1 image, in the case of a Venu 2 Plus 416x416 AND a combined image that is already being displayed [with the correct overlay] by the Simulator, tailored to the size expected for uploading images.

    Surely that's not so hard and it would mean everyone can get a uniform non distorted image designed to meet the upload requirements.

    Without this -

    I used Paint 3D to make a square image of the overlay [say 601x 601] and resized to 500x 500.

    Using paint 3D again one has to resize manually any captured image from 416x416 to about 366x366.

    Then they have to be merged and positioned which takes time to get accurate.

    Alternatively merge the full overlay and image, make it square, then resize to 500 by 500.

    But what a complicated procedure when the image is already correctly displayed on the screen and could be saved cropped and resized by default!

  • If you do much with CIQ, you'll find many cases where editing an image is needed.  Launcher_Icon, bitmaps, you may want to clean up some custom fonts, etc.  And recall, not all CIQ devices are watches.  You got Edge device and Outdoor handhelds.  Making a sq image for the store, isn't that complicated compared to other things you may want to do with CIQ.

  • You can save jpeg/png with bigger comparison ratio and produce smaller file. Simple and fast, nobody even noticed the difference in quality.