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Comment by asipasip | Hacker News Reader

What is this for? I don't see the use case.

I'm equally confused. Why would I want to take a perfectly good screenshot and then shrink it down so it fits within a square and fill >50% of the canvas pixels with a gradient background?

I think this is some (new?) social media trend, my school started doing it too with their images on facebook. Half the image is just a border so the actual image is really low res. I have no idea why they do it though.

Some social media sites and apps like to cut off the sides to fit content onto different screen sizes and aspect ratios.

I think adding a border is an attempt to preserve the essential parts of the images in those situations. It really should not be necessary, but alas modern/stupid problems require modern/stupid solutions.

This is a more generous explanation than my cynical first assumption, that they were trying to get away with saving lower res pictures to save on storage costs.

It's optional you can turn it off at bottom floating navbar.

so it's for drawing attention on social media?

this is current way of showing design screenshots, as plain screenshots gets buried under and most of the time designer, or frontend devs generate their own workflow for handling this grunt work of beautifying their work. it's tool to remove that pain point.

Because it looks nice and makes it pop in a social media feed.

I can maybe see some value for opening a web page like this, then taking a set of screenshots (for me CMD+SHIFT+4) which automatically get added to the web page, which the user can then curate in some way to generate a final image for download. If the dev who built this web page can work out a way to get the web page to automatically ingest user screenshots while the page is open then I think this tool becomes a lot more interesting.

I did a similar thing for generating a video from multiple screen captures - GitHub repo here: https://github.com/KaliedaRik/sc-screen-recorder

As a dev who loves sharing stuff on X, this is super useful. You can use it to post clean screenshots for: - showing off a new UI component you built - sharing code snippets or errors with context - bug reports that don’t look like chaos

But it's not a clean screenshot. There's a space-wasting gradient fill behind it.

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