It’s inevitable. We get used to a certain way of doing things, then something changes and it makes us irrationally frustrated. For me, in the past few weeks this has been my experience with trying to take in-game screenshots with the “print screen” button on my keyboard. For some reason in some games I have been running through Steam the print screen key takes a picture of the desktop underneath the game rather than what I am looking at on the screen. According to the readings suggested by my friend Google, I could use the Steam shortcut key instead, but it hides the images in a folder I could not have found just by browsing in Windows Explorer. This made it difficult to find the images for cropping, filtering, and uploading to this blog without the workaround of searching the Steam folder for *.jpg.
This is how I fished out all the images I have used from Gone Home and Civilization 6. I decided to try the other way because this workaround is a little bit annoying. According to the forum posts I was reading it should have been possible to open the screenshots folder from Steam’s Screenshot Uploader. But in the Screenshot Uploader accessible from the shift-tab overlay the only option appeared to be uploading it to their cloud when I just wanted an image file that I could upload into my WordPress media library. Though, according to what I was reading, I should be able to click on a “show on disk” button on my screenshot uploader between “select all” and “view online library.”
But after spending more time searching, I found that going through the Steam launcher shows an almost identical Screenshot Uploader, but behold: the “show on disk” button of legend truly does exist!
This works. It is passable. I am disappointed that I had to do a research project instead of being able to do things the way I’ve always been able to do them. I can live with this. But if there are better ways to get screenshots in video games or an explanation I can understand as to why some games do this and some do not, please point me in the right direction. I suppose I shouldn’t complain about a little bit of light reading. As a person who professes to value the willingness to learn, change, and adapt I know I shouldn’t be mad when I actually have to go do it. But, just like my favourite karaoke bar finally moving their song lists from coil-bound books to tablets, I will have to accept that the special key whose history dates back to MS-DOS might not forever be the best way to do this task.
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