Lesson: Take a screenshot

This lesson describes how to quickly take a screenshot with FSP or FSXP.

Taking screenshots is a 'stupid task'.

Without FS(X)P, you must

(1) Press the PRNT key on your keyboard
(2) Hide FS2004 or finish it
(3) Open a image editor
(4) Paste the image into the editor
(5) Crop the image (cut away the margins of the desktop)
(6) Think about a suitable image format
(7) Save the image into a folder (be sure that you will forget where it is after a while unless you are really organized)
(8) resize the screenshot to a thumbnail size (small)
(9) give it a different name and save.

50 clicks later - Puh. When you call up the image after some time, you will not remember where it was taken unless you give the image a very good name ....

With FS(X)P you simply

(1) click the screenshot button.

Thats all.
FSP will take a screenshot of only the FS2004 screen, save it to a predfined directory (fs9dir\fspilot\screenshots) in a certain, definable image quality and save a thumbnail of definable size in (fs9dir\fspilot\screenshots\thumbnails). This takes milliseconds. So you are ready to take the next shot sort of NOW. For each screenshot, a Google Earth KML file is created. Call up the KML with the identical name - and you will be taken to the location where the image was taken, correct altitude, heading, etc. All screenshot operations are saved in FSP database for further reference.


Clicking the screenshot button AND holding the SHIFT key enables to enter a title for the screenshot into the FSP database.

In a flightplan, enter 'take screenshot' at any place to automatically take a screenshot at the current location.

The default screenshot parameters can be defined in fspilot.ini (fspilot home dir).

....
ScreenshotEncoder=JPG
ScreenshotQuality=80.0
ScreenshotThumbnailWidth=200.0
ScreenshotThumbnailHeight=150.0
....

ScreenshotEncoder accepts JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIF formats. JPG and GIF are recommended.
Set Screenshotquality to values between 0.0 and 100.0 for JPG and GIF.