I looked this up because I am early in being a self-employed web services provider and I want to document how long it takes me to get ‘x’ task done—right now just for me but I could see using it for client accountability later.

Anyway, I am not quite comfortable with Terminal yet so let me ask a few questions:
When you write ‘for developers’ are you just assuming they will know to do the ‘cd’ command part and that they will also know to denote a folder where the .pngs will be saved to?

Let’s say I create a folder in my ‘Pictures’ folder called ‘TimedScreenshots.’ If I understand what you wrote here I would:
1. open Terminal
2. type [cd_] without brackets, space represented by the underscore.
3. Navigate to /Pictures/
4. Open it, and drag /TimedScreenshots/ onto/into the open Terminal Interace (window).

Now, will the path that shows up in Terminal be the path to the ‘TimedScreenshots’ folder? (sorry, seeing ‘Data/Applications’ has me a bit spooked in case I do something wrong)

5. press the return/enter key
6. type [for i in {1..9999}; do echo “taking screen shot $i”; screencapture -x “helloworld$i.png”; sleep 1; done] (without the square brackets).
7. press the return/enter key

Adjust the frequency of screenshots via the [sleep 1] portion of the command, with the number used seconds between screenshots.

To stop I just quit Terminal.

Is this correct?

If I use the second variation from dimitar at what point (either by dragging a folder or by typing the path?) would I specify the location where the screenshots will be saved. Unmodified where would it save the screenshots?

You say the second variation has to be specifically stopped, does that mean quitting Terminal or would I need a command to force it to stop?

I have ScreenFlow, how would screenshots every second (let’s say .png files like in the first method because they tend to be bigger) compare in total file size to simply capturing a screenflow (for my use only)?

Thanks and great post.

To be honest I don’t know, in the terminal did you get all the “taking screen shot x messages ?”

Otherwise I don’t know what could cause it, try reducing the sleep time and seeing if its still broken, or failing that there could be a better way now in screencapture, try man screencapture, and see if there’s a repeat flag or something

Tell me how you get along, good luck ant

after 10 hours I’ve been gone, I get screenshots from 1 to 9… and then screenshot n. 490
WTF happened to all the others? O_O