Capture the Moment:
Easy Guide to the new Snapshot Preview

Second Life 1.11 introduced a new Snapshot Preview for taking in-world photos. It includes some features long-requested by Residents and ultimately gives everyone more control of how to preserve your Second Life memories. Understandably, getting used to it can be confusing—that's what this guide is for!

To bring up the Snapshot Preview, click the "Snapshot" button on the Toolbar at the bottom of your screen.

• The first thing you'll notice is the screen flashes and may look a little blocky—especially if you're at a high resolution. Don't worry, like the name says, this is just a preview—not the final result.


• What you'll also notice is that the rest of the user interface (Toolbar, menus, windows, etc.) has disappeared; the world is "frozen" and you can't move around. Don't worry about this either: if you click the "Discard" button, everything will go back to normal and you can click "Snapshot" again.


• While in Snapshot Preview, the cursor turns into a magnifying glass with a + on it, so you can click-and-drag to get better shots. (It's the same as normally holding Alt and clicking the mouse button.)


• Another important thing that might be confusing at first: whenever something changes within the "scene"—like you zoom to a different angle—and the snapshot requires an update, the screen will appear to drop away with a cool visual effect, like a Polaroid.

Snapshot Preview Options
As indicated under "What would you like to do?", there are three modes:

Send a postcard - Allows you to email a picture from within Second Life to an outside email address for free. Share what you're seeing with a friend!

Upload a texture - Charges you L$10 and directly saves the snapshot you've taken to your Inventory. It'll appear in the My Inventory > Photo Album folder with a default name of "Snapshot", which you can rename by right-clicking on it and selecting "Rename".

Save snapshot to hard drive - Does just what it says! Good for safekeeping and backup—you wouldn't want to lose your precious memories!

Under "What size image do you need?", you can specify the dimensions of the picture you want to take. "Current Window" means Second Life's entire display area according to the way you have it set. Bigger pictures will have more detail, but take a larger amount of memory (file size) too, so it's up to you to decide what best fits the situation. A size of 1024x768 is pretty standard, but you can easily set it however you want. Keep in mind taking really big (high-resolution) images will freeze your computer for awhile. This is normal, because they require more computer power and memory to process.

NOTE: In "Upload a texture" mode, textures will be uploaded to the nearest power of two. For example, 128, 256, 512, 1024. So if you upload something that's 234x516, it'll ultimately end up as 256x512.

Beneath this, there's an "Image Quality" slider. This is only available in "Send a postcard" mode, because postcards are reduced in file size by a type of compression called JPEG, which is especially effective for pictures with smooth gradients like natural landscapes. The benefit: pictures which don't clog up your email box or wherever you store them. The disadvantage is they may have a noticeable loss of detail and blurriness. Try this: move the slider all the way to 0, then click "Update Snapshot". Isn't that ugly? Now move it to 75 and "Update Snapshot" again. Much better, right? Aim to achieve a compromise between image quality and file size.

"Image Quality" is something Residents have been asking us for ages—in previous versions of Second Life, there was no way to control this!

NOTE: The maximum size for a "Send a postcard" snapshot is 1 megabyte, or a little over 1,000,000 bytes. (Learn more about bytes.) If you go over that, "File size" will be in red and you won't be able to send it. Just move the "Image Quality" slider towards the left until you're under that limit.

There's a pop-up menu only available in "Save snapshot to hard drive" mode which defaults to "Colors", which is the normal way of taking pictures. "Depth" gives the per-pixel depth information of the scene. "Object Id" gives a unique color to each object in-world, making it easy to create mattes and other advanced post-processing in an image editor like Photoshop. It also has a retro green-and-blue effect which can be used artistically.

Keep looking down and you'll see the following:

• Show interface in snapshot - The user interface of Second Life includes the Toolbar, menus, windows, and other things you use to interact and change things in the world. By checking this box, the UI will show up in screenshots, which can be useful for making tutorials like teaching others how to build, or even diagnostic purposes like showing someone else a bug instead of describing it to them in words.


• Show HUD objects in snapshot - This is another long-requested feature which has come at last! Heads-Up Displays are useful, but can get in the way of picture-taking. This automatically hides them so you don't have to fumble around.


• Keep open after saving - This keeps the Snapshot Preview floater open after you've saved a picture. Useful if you're going to take multiple pictures in rapid succession and pick out the best later.


• Keep specified aspect ratio - Lets you crop the pictures you take, giving them a letterboxed or portrait feel. You'll notice when this checkbox is ticked, white bars appear showing the actual area that will be captured, and the rest of the screen is dimmed out. If this isn't on, images at odd aspect ratios (like 1024x128) will be distorted unnaturally. (Which is okay if you want to do that intentionally!)

Keep in mind that after checking each one of these options, you won't see the effect immediately unless you update the snapshot. To do this, just press the "Update Snapshot" button. There's also a handy "Update automatically" checkbox which detects when there's changes.

TIP: To take a snapshot without the Snapshot Preview coming up, you can just go to File menu > Snapshot to Disk or use Ctrl-` as a shortcut.

Happy snapping!