Use the Snapshot tool

- [Instructor] Hi I'm Jim Rogers, and, this week on Bluebeam tips and tricks, I want to show you how to use the Snapshot tool, which is found here in the Edit menu. Clicking on the Edit menu and scrolling down towards the bottom, you'll see the Snapshot tool, here. Let's take a look at how to use this. So, one of the things that the Snapshot tool can be used for is to simply copy and paste images from one place in your document to another place in your document. So, for example, if I scroll in on my image here, I see that this cross section callout can be found as Detail two on sheet A3.2.

So, one of the ways I can look at that cross section is by clicking on this sheet A3.2 because I showed you in an earlier episode how to make this a clickable link. So, now if I click on that, I jump to sheet A3.2 and here's my detail two. That's one way I can look at the detail, but let's use this Snapshot feature, and let's go ahead and copy and paste this image, this cross section, onto that other page. 'Cause it looked like there was plenty of blank space on that other page, so why continue to jump over to this detail page? Let's just copy and paste it onto that other sheet using the Snapshot tool.

Very simple, click on Edit, select Snapshot, you'll see that my cursor has turned into crosshairs. I'm going to use that by holding the left mouse button down, drawing a box around what I want to copy. When I release the mouse button, it highlights blue and you can see a box around the image that I've captured in this Snapshot. Now, all I have to do, let's zoom out and click back, I think, two pages, find the callout that we were looking at.

Now, what I have to do is change to the Select tool, the bottom of the screen, go ahead and use that to place the cursor approximately on the page where I would like to paste that image. Right-click and select Paste. Give it just a second and you'll see that it has pasted the image right on my drawing, it's a markup like any other markups, so I can click and move it around, I can use the handles to change the size of the markup.

And, just like that, I've added this particular markup to the plan sheet instead of having to jump over to the detail sheet. Now, there are a lot of ways you can leverage the Snapshot tool, including the fact that you can quickly snap a copy of an image or an area on the drawings that you might want to embed in a memo in an RFI, so you're not just restricted to this same document. Click over to my RFI document here, and right-click again, and click on Paste, and it'll put this image right into our RFI document.

Remember, you can grab these handles and shrink that image down until it gets to a useable size. And, now you can quickly put that image or detail from the plan sheet right into an RFI or a memo. Now, the other thing that makes this Snapshot tool really handy is the fact that it saves what you just did as a Recently Used Tool over here in your toolbox. So, if we open up the toolbox, you'll see that I've used that tool twice now and it saved it as a Recently Used Tool.

Now, this is really cool because not only do I want to embed, in this case, this image on this plan sheet but I've got the same callout on the sheet before it, I'd like to embed that image here, but I don't want to have to repeat those same steps, and I don't have to. I can just select this Recently Used Tool, and you'll see that that immediately drags it over to this page. We'll go to the page before that where I have the same callout, I'm going to click it again and just take my cursor and put it right on that page.

Again, I can make it bigger or smaller. And, all of this gets saved as a Recently Used Tool. Now, if this is an image or, we'll call it, a tool or a markup that you want to save for future use and use over and over again, you can just take and click that tool under Recently Used Tools, and drag right up here to, I'll use the My Tools toolbox. You can also put it in any of your other toolboxes. And that permanently saves it as a Snapshot that you can use over and over again in this document or any other document because you've saved it to your Tool Chest.

If you're using Bluebeam to create drawings and details from scratch, like it discussed in one of my other courses, or you're using it to do things like add extensive markups to existing plans, like maybe you're creating a traffic control plan from a set of street drawings, then this Snapshot feature is also a great way to quickly add symbols and images to your toolbox and build up that library of tools. I hope this week's tip helps you as you continue using Bluebeam, I appreciate you watching, and I'll be back again with more next week.