Skitch Not Working With Over 9,000 Screenshots

[nkings10 1]

Hey,

My Skitch for Mac has been getting worse and worse as more screenshots are added. I currently have 9,322 and its causing issues. I cannot seem to find a way to un-link them from Skitch without deleting them.

I have created a new notebook and changed the Skitch sync directory. After doing this all screenshots are still appearing in Skitch.

As a workaround I have exported 1,000 screenshots from Evernote into an enex file, deleted them and then imported them. This is very time consuming for what should be an easy task.

I had to modify my config.json file located in /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Evernote to bypass the 50 selection limit in the newer versions of Evernote (very stupid limitation by the way).

"qa": {
    "multiSelectionLimit": 1000
}

It seems to be working as theres now 8,322 screenshots listed in Skitch, but surely this isn't the only way to do this. Skitch is basically unusable with over 9,000 screenshots and I'm running a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra.

Can someone please suggest an alternate method to unlink screenshots from Skitch without deleting them?

[gazumped 11,667]

Hi.  I'm not a Mac or Skitch user,  but I would have thought that this is a terminally bad idea for what is essentially a personal note-taking app.  Thousands of screenshots must amount to a huge amount of data.  If another app would handle this task better,  I'd suggest exporting the data and uninstalling Skitch completely.  Other Mac user here might have some alternative ideas,  but I'm afraid I can't help!  

[PinkElephant 8,117]

Sorry to be drastic: You worked hours, days and weeks to shovel nearly 10.000 screenshots on a huge heap, and now you feel like that mountain is sliding down over you ? A little late to develop that thought, just to mention …

Skitch itself could always save screenshots outside of EN, simply as a picture file to disk. Or you could save them to EN, synced into notes. And then they are saved in Skitch as well - although I think these are only thumbnails showing the content of the related EN notes. This would explain performance issues after 10.000 links piling up.

Now you write something about unlinking screenshots from EN. 

For me it is not clear what situation you want to reach in the end. Do you want the screenshots deleted altogether ? Do you want them exported as picture files, for example to load them into a fotos database ? Do you want them in EN notes (maybe with tags and stuff, because what do you do with 10.000 pictures without any additional information), but not in Skitch any more ?

Please describe what is your ideal future situation - skip the technical side of how to reach it. Before you don’t define where you want to be in the end, it makes no sense to talk about the tire pressure.

[nkings10 1]

I know the number of screenshots is a lot and have been accumulating from years of use. My goal was to move them from the Skitch synced notebook and not have them displayed in Skitch anymore but still keep them in Evernote to search. I occasionally need a screenshot and its been super handy to be able to search and find what i'm looking for from weeks, months or even years ago. Storage isn't too bad, its about 4.5GB of screenshots in total. I pay for Evernote Personal which includes 10GB of uploads per month, I'm using about 1% of that allowance in screenshots.

Ideally i would just love to remove them from Skitch. I currently have Skitch pointed at a notebook called "Screenshots" which has 60 screenshots in it, but Skitch is still showing everything I've ever screenshot minus the 1,000 i was able to remove using the export, delete and import process i detailed above.

[PinkElephant 8,117]

Just played a little - which is no guarantee, because setups can differ. So give it a try yourself.

When in Skitch in the Thumbail view, you can select a thumbnail. If you then give a right click and choose „Delete“, it says it will send the EN note to the trash.

But it doesn’t, at least when I tried. The EN note stayed where it was, but in Skitch the thumbnail was gone.

Maybe you could simply select (multiple selection possible) and delete the thumbnails in Skitch. It probably leaves everything intact where you want it, in EN, OCRed and searchable for your needs.

As a safeguard for testing you could create note duplicates before deleting the thumbnails in Skitch. Even if the original notes would be trashed (can be reactivated as well), you stay with the duplicates.

As I said, this is what happened when I tried, no guarantees whatsoever. If is works, it could resolve the issue of Skitch clogging up while keeping the saved screenshots in EN.

P.S. I think you are doing perfectly fine by saving stuff in your account - this is what EN is build for, in the end. I did not want to question whether to save something, I questioned the goal of that group of data collected. Because often understanding the „Why“ is important to share some advise. No problem with collecting screenshots, you seem to know what for.

[PinkElephant 8,117]

Postscript: I just filed a support ticket.

All notes created by Skitch are Read-only in my EN account. It makes completely no sense that I clip something, but then can’t add a single word to the clip to make it show additional information. I can think of a million of uses for sich screenshots, but I need to be able to add explanatory stuff to the notes.

Even when I duplicate or create a copy of the initial note, the duplicate (which is not linked to Skitch any more) is read-only as well.

What you can see from this as well: I personally rarely use Skitch any more. To grab something from my desktop, I use the Shottr app. More modern than Skitch, and better looking annotations than that ugly stuff Skitch offers.

[nkings10 1]

I went through and backed up my Skitch notebook and then deleted everything from Skitch and they got removed from Evernote too.

I was able to right click on the notebook and export the whole thing, i then deleted from Skitch and am yet to reimport. But i did have around 700 or so screenshots stored elsewhere other than the Skitch notebook which i didn't backup. They are not important, just annoying that its this difficult to "Archive" screenshots in Skitch.

I think I'm going to phase out Skitch and Evernote over the next 12 months for other solutions. I'll have a look at Shottr for screenshots.