One of the great joys of working at Stardock is releasing new products. From scoping a product, testing, feedback loops, and finally, shipping the app – it’s a lot of work and also a lot of fun.

One of the key aspects of shipping an update is taking screenshots and it’s a lot harder than you might think. Thus, the reason for this post as it’s a bit of inside baseball about how we think about how to post product screenshots and of course, using wallpapers from Wincustomize (and uploading them when I remember) is a core part of the process.

When looking at a screenshot, there are a lot of considerations: what aspect ratio/resolution, are you taking a screenshot of entire desktop or a small section of it, do you need it to fit a theme (work, home, school), light or dark, and the list goes on and on. I have a folder that I use to save hundreds of different screenshot assets to help stage these setups and while some of them are organic with real-world items like OneDrive home/work, we do stage for some industries.

And then there are other items you have to consider, is a widget on the taskbar displaying a news item that ruins the shot, or do you have a sync error with OneDrive in the system tray that is distracting? And then trying to make sure nothing personal or sensitive company information is shown like a Teams chat message or a financial document.

I have setup VMs and other clean environments in the past but we don’t release products every week and those environments often feel a bit dated when I turn them back on (and not even counting the lost time as they try to update).

Which brings me to Wincustomize and DeskScapes11, I browse the site a lot trying to find wallpapers that are generally simplistic, geometric, and items that don’t have a distinguishable feature – you don’t want a logo/character in the image typically unless it’s related to the app.

Taking screenshots usually results in dozens taken, but only 10 or so make the final cut for various reasons. And far too often I forget to switch between dark and light themes; the Fences 6 beta release had 96 screenshots taken.

One of the interesting little tidbits is that all of our screenshots are taken at 1080P currently as they appear best on a website with constrained widths. At some point, I’m sure we will switch to 4k but for now, we haven’t made that jump yet as more users are running desktops in 1080P than 4k.