How do I Export/Download Screenshots?

lIf you wish to store copies of your team’s screenshots locally due to our data retention policy, you can choose to export or download them. There are two ways you can download your organization members’ screenshots. Please click on any of the two ways linked below to begin downloading the screenshots:

Table of contents

• Downloading screenshots directly from your Hubstaff dashboard
• Downloading screenshots using the Hubstaff Export tool
  • Installing Ruby
  • Downloading and running the Hubstaff Export Tool
  • Getting your Personal Access Token (PAT)
  • Exporting Screenshots using the Hubstaff Export Tool

• SSL errors

Downloading screenshots directly from your Hubstaff dashboard

Downloading a copy of your teams’ screenshots is easy with Hubstaff’s bulk screenshot download feature.

Follow the steps below to get started.

Firstly, on the sidebar menu on the left-hand side of the screen, click on Activity > Screenshots.

Next, you’ll see the Screenshots page. Click on the Download screenshots button.

After that, the Download screenshots dialog window will appear. From here, you can select the team member’s name, as well as the date range of the screenshots you want to be included in the download. Hit Save to continue.

After saving, the following dialog will appear, informing you that your screenshots are being prepared. Click OK. Depending on the server load and the amount of requested data, it could take up to a day to receive.

You will then receive an email sent to your registered address once your download is ready. Click on the download link in your email to begin your bulk screenshot download.

Lastly, once the download is complete, navigate to your computer’s Downloads folder, or the location where your browser stores downloads by default. Locate the downloaded file, then unzip the file to the needed location.

Open the downloaded folder, then double-click on the file named ScreenshotViewer.html.

Alternatively: Open the Screenshots folder to view the raw screenshot image files organized by date and time.

A browser window will open which will show the downloaded screenshots.

You can click on a date on the calendar marked with red dots to see the downloaded screens for that particular day.

You can also filter the report by project as shown below:

If your employee is using multiple displays, you can select which screenshots you need to view by filtering the report by the display as shown here:

How to download screenshots using the Hubstaff Export tool?

In order to store your screenshots long-term, or use them in your custom tool based on Hubstaff’s API, you may need to export them. Fortunately, we have a tool that makes it very easy to quickly export screenshots to retain for your own records.

Installing Ruby

To use the Hubstaff Export Tool, you will need to have Ruby installed on your computer. See how to install Ruby on various operating systems. Here are additional Ruby setup guides:

• How to Install Ruby on Windows
• Installing Ruby on Linux
• How to Install Ruby on macOS (Ruby comes pre-installed on Macs, so you likely already have it)

To verify that you have Ruby installed, type the following command into the command line in your terminal (macOS/Linux), PowerShell, or command prompt (Windows).:

ruby -v

Downloading and running the Hubstaff Export Tool

With Ruby installed on your system, you can run the hubstaff-export.rb file from the repository link in Step 1 below.

Download the Hubstaff Export Tool by clicking on Code > Download ZIP.

Unzip the hubstaff-export.rb file to the location of your choice.

Open a terminal window or command prompt and navigate to the directory where you have downloaded and unzipped the hubstaff-export.rb file.

• How to open PowerShell or a command prompt on Windows
• Opening a terminal window on macOS
• How to open a terminal window on Linux

For example, if you have the hubstaff-export.rb file on your Windows desktop, your file path will be:

C:\Users\{YourUserName}\Desktop

or on a Mac, it would be

$HOME/Desktop

You may change the directory by using the cd command (without quotes) e.g.,

cd Desktop

or

cd Downloads

Getting your Personal Access Token (PAT)

You will only need to do this step one time. First, make sure that you have a Personal Access Token. You can create a token by signing in, then clicking on the Generate new token button.

With your PAT in hand, you can run this command:

ruby hubstaff-export.rb authenticate YourPAT

Replace YourPAT with your PAT content and click Enter.

Example:

ruby hubstaff-export.rb token eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIsImtpZCI6ImRlZmF1bHQifQ.eyJqdGkiOiJVRktLNll4SyIsImlzcyI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYWNjb3VudC5odWJzdGFmZi5jb20iLCJleHAiOjE2NDMyMTY4MTEsImlhdCI6MTYzNTQzNzIxMSwic2NvcGUiOiJvcGVuaWQgcHJvZmlsZSBlbWFpbCBodWJzdGFmZjpyZWFkIn0.w6-H5yZLtVj0DLjdvIJCNDvFf1yVKS6OJx8UYpJE28acujMwTKsO009tMWQ7Zpz_QlKMOPEQhihL3oVkO5g2tmNI2Dmy8HuwFkiqZpGmjQvoUFwuEw43CcW2dHsBjn8OHz6lQlV-dt39WclLwJfMNZlXtmbMgR3O5yxjgfA0VDGpB9PbS5nFfTLWdc5c0Z3ZGHr3yrVj2_vrWFh1ar91EHh1COrqUbfIH6XEHtJg1-kBy0lT2LA4YSk5dLkg_qoP6MoMcc8Ka60RXmctCNKiR67wB9XmgG8fA42buRGMOAQGOb3rGLMMuQlw5seA3btwLrPsRjXix9USU1xywRP2tQ

After running the command, you should see Token verification successful. Tokens are now cached in ./hubstaff-client.cfg.

Exporting Screenshots using the Hubstaff Export Tool

Now you can run the command that will export your screenshots. An example command would be:

ruby hubstaff-export.rb export-screens 2015-07-01T00:00:00Z 2015-07-01T07:00:00Z -o [your_organization_id] -i both

The command should have the -o argument specified (meaning the organization ID). In order to obtain the organization ID, you can go to the https://app.hubstaff.com/organizations page and click on the organization you want to extract screenshots from. Copy the ID from the browser address bar. Example: https://app.hubstaff.com/organizations/[organization_id]/members.

Start and Stop time are required. Start and stop time should be in the following format: YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmZ where Z means that the time is in UTC (or it can be a time zone offset).

Example:

• 2022-06-01T04:00Z
• 2022-06-01T00:00-0400
• 2022-06-01T05:00+0100

— all represent the same time.

Thus, to fetch the 8 hours of screens that the user worked, you would specify 2022-04-25T16:00Z > 2022-04-26T00:00Z

Another way to specify the time is to explicitly specify the time zone in the ISO 8601 format, e.g.,

2022-04-26T00:00+0800 > 2022-04-26T08:00+0800

If you want to specify the time in eastern you need to use an offset on the time e.g.,

2022-04-24T08:30:00-0400 (for DST) or 2022-01-01T08:30:00-0500 (for non-DST). Or convert your times to UTC first when using the Z suffix.

After the start and stop times, you can add optional parameters. In the example above, -o 84 means Hubstaff organization with the ID 84. The -i both option means that both full-size and thumbnail images are downloaded. Other options are -i full (to download full-size images only, this is the default), -i thumb (to download thumbnails only), and -u 12 which denotes a specific user on the organization.

For a complete list of the available options, run:

ruby hubstaff-export.rb -h 

After running the command, you should see Saving screenshots:

The screenshots are then downloaded to your current directory (from where you run the script).

SSL Errors

If you’re on Windows, you may get SSL errors when you try to authenticate or export the screenshots.

To fix this, you’ll first want to download this file: http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem.

Next, you’ll need to create an environment variable called SSL_CERT_FILE and set its value to where you downloaded the cacert.pem file.

If you’re not sure how to create an environment variable, please see the instructions below:

1. Firstly, open Search using Win+S hotkey, type View advanced system settings, and open them.
2. Next, in the opened System Properties window, navigate to the Advanced tab and click the Environment variables button.
3. In the next window, Environment Variables, under System variables, click on the New… button.
4. For the Variable name field, enter SSL_CERT_FILE.
5. For the Variable value field, enter the file path to where you downloaded the cacert.pem file previously. If you downloaded it to your desktop, for example, it might look like C:Users{YourUserName}Desktopcacert.pem.
6. Finally, click OK.

Once you’ve done that, fully close out of all PowerShell or command prompt windows you might have opened and restart the command prompt. You should no longer receive SSL errors.