Change Pasted Image format from Tiff to JPG How?

Has anyone worked out if there is a permanent solution to paste-as-tiff ?

Paste meaning paste of a rectangle of image in the clipboard rather than drag/drop of an image file, or copy of a file (that happens to be an image) and paste into Mail.app's compose window.

- Paul

Paul,

This was certainly a rather mixed-bag topic, and pretty far off the mark. If you find a JPEG file, and copy it, and then paste into a New Message it is not changed to TIFF. The conversion to Tiff is limited, in my experience and testing, to images contained within HTML text, and this is what causes the conversion, because you are pasting both text and image -- the text is the actual link of where the image resides on a server. To see this, control-click on an image in a page on Firefox, and choose Send Image -- you will see that it results in a New Message window with the link of where the image is located, ending in .jpg -- but it is not the image.

Open the same page in Safari, and control-click on the image, you see that the resulting contextual menu has a different set of choices, one of which is to Copy the Image, but the result is different as others have pointed out.

This action is not due to anything in Mail, but rather to the contextual menu that is implemented for use in Firefox vs Safari.

Ernie

Wow, you'd think a simple question would deserve a simple answer. Good info but, way off topic. I challenge anyone to do what I believe "madpixl" was trying to do over a year and half ago without getting a pasted TIFF.

1. Cmd-Shift-4.
2. Using the crosshair select an area of your screen.
3. Open mail, select File > New Message.
4. Tab into the body and type Cmd-v.
5. Right click (Ctrl-click) the image you just pasted and select "View as Icon".
6. Now the challenge... tell me that's not a .TIFF image. If you still think it's incognito, try sending it to a windows user.

It would be hard to get farther off the mark than you have strayed. Cmd-shift-4 is start of the command to do a screenshot -- it is something very different from right-click or control-click to then Copy for later pasting.

The type of file that results from a screenshot has nothing to do with type of file displayed on the screen or its source. The default for screenshots (also called Grabs) is TIFF. With other changes, the resultant can be a .png type file. Read about this in the Mac Help under Help when in a Finder window.

Ernie

Btw, I routinely send screenshots to other users, but if they are using WIndows, and I don't think they have a photo app, I convert the .tif to JPEG using Preview, Graphic Converter or Photoshop.

To better understand what it is you have been using, see:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/cdb_scrshtfky.html

Message was edited by: Ernie Stamper

To change the clipboard, in terminal one writes:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpeg
That does not change the clipboard format (since there really is no "format" for the clipboard). It changes the screen capture (Command Shift 3, Command Shift 4) format.
If you right click - copy, it copies in the original format.

1. Cmd-Shift-4.

As Ernie noted, that has nothing to do with copying an image. That is a screen snapshot.
Right click - copy a .jpg and it wwill be pasted as a .jpg

OK, didn't mean to ruffle anyone's feathers. I was probably too quick to interpret the original question with a frustration of mine own.

Very often I find the need to just grab a piece of the screen that I'm seeing and quickly send that off in a response to a client email. I'd like to do this without the tedious process of re-saving it via Preview or any other image application.

Just wish I could change the format that a simple screenshot pastes into mail.

Just wish I could change the format that a simple screenshot

You can change the format a screenshot takes, very easily.

In Terminal type,

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type format

Change format to the format you want the screenshots to be. jpeg, pdf, tiff, png, psd, bmp, pict

Or use this -> savescreenie
or this -> Shot Choice

Reading thru the forum I would have guess the terminal command would work. It did not. So, I tried use your Save Screenie recommendation. This didn't work either. Do I need to delete the pref file or something? It's lock into using TIFF's no matter what I try.

Log out and log back in or in Terminal

killall SystemUIServer

I am curious -- what is it that you need screenshots of to send to people without Macs, considering that many things will copy/paste without a screenshot?

Ernie

Yeah, did that, complete Restarts, even tried Zapping PRAM if that's still effective in Leopard. Nothing.

Ernie Stamper wrote:
I am curious -- what is it that you need screenshots of to send to people without Macs, considering that many things will copy/paste without a screenshot?

Ernie

I do web design and development. Very often I need to grab a piece of what I'm seeing in the browser and send it to my client for discussion. Much of what I need to grab is a composite of images that make up a rendered page in the browser which I cannot right click to copy/paste. The point is there are many ways in which I could use a simple Cmd Shft4, select what I need - paste into mail and have it be in a format (JPG) that would nearly guarantee visibility on the other end.

I do that sort of thing with SnapZ Pro, and my output format of choice is PDF. But its preferences will allow choosing JPEG as output file type. It uses Cmd Shift3 to invoke. Little Snapper does much the same thing, I believe, with similar command sequence.

Ernie

..."
1. Cmd-Shift-4.
2. Using the crosshair select an area of your screen.
3. Open mail, select File > New Message.
4. Tab into the body and type Cmd-v.
5. Right click (Ctrl-click) the image you just pasted and select "View as Icon".
6. Now the challenge... tell me that's not a .TIFF image. If you still think it's incognito, try sending it to a windows user.
"...

Note that the Cmd-Shift-4 shortcut saves the screenshot to a file - it won't go to the clipboard without including the Ctrl key (which can be used with the other screenshot combinations as well).

Hence going to step 4 (Cmd-v), you aren't pasting your new screencapture, but rather what was previously in the clipboard - if that happens to be the "raw" image data (eg. from selecting "all" or a region, and copying out of a graphics programme), the system clipboard uses TIFF format, as "chris_R" has been saying, so you will end up pasting TIFF while your screenshot sits unused on the "Desktop".

Cmd-Shift-Ctrl-4 should send the screenshot data to the clipboard using the format specified in the .plist file. Third-party software should not be required for this.