PDF Viewer: Ability to take snapshot

calvinke
I am now using the PDF viewer for the first time. I commonly need to extract figures from PDF files by using the snapshot function available in most PDF readers. Does this feature exist in Zotero, or if not, could it be added?
  • adamsmith
    The "select area" tool does this (third out of the four annotation tools).
  • calvinke
    Thanks Adam. I tried to select an area but I just get a yellow box, nothing is copied to the clipboard. I may be completely missing this, but how do I actually copy the image? If I click on the box it allows me to add a comment, clicking on the 3 dots allows me to change the colour or delete the box.
  • adamsmith
    The snapshoted image automatically appears in the annotation on the left (click on the middle, post-it type icon if you don't see annotations in the bar on the left).
    If you do want to copy to the clipboard, you can do that after adding the annotation to a note, though a major reason for using the PDF Viewer would be that you stay in Zotero.
  • calvinke
    I see. This tool is good for reading and annotating PDFs within Zotero, but for my purpose, I often need to additionally extract images to paste into external presentations. I may just disable the internal PDF reader to speed up my workflow.
  • emelon8
    I would also like to see this feature in Zotero's PDF viewer! I frequently use the "Take a snapshot" tool in Adobe's PDF Reader, which allows users to draw a box over an area to automatically copy it to the clipboard. I use it whenever I need to paste a figure from a paper into a presentation. If I wanted to do this without leaving Zotero, I could use the current annotation tool (which I appreciate and use for annotations!), but then I would always need to go back and delete the annotation and note after I copy the snapshot.
  • dstillman
    @emelon8: This is planned, but in the meantime you can of course just use your OS's screenshot functionality. E.g., on macOS you would just press Cmd-Shift-4 and select the area to save a screenshot to your desktop. (The main advantage of built-in copy functionality will be that the image resolution wouldn't depend on the current zoom level.)
  • emelon8
    Very cool, thanks! Adobe's viewer even depends on zoom level, so that would be awesome.
  • dstillman
    In Zotero 6.0.14, available now, we've added "Copy Image" and "Save Image As…" options to the context menu for image annotations.
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