Using Screenshots to Examine Many Files Quickly

I had a couple of projects that called for a way to examine a large number of files.  It seemed that screenshots could help in those projects.  This post describes the techniques I used.

EML Analysis

In one project, I was working with various email files that I had exported from Thunderbird.  These files had an EML extension.  Typically, if I viewed an EML file in Notepad, I would see various codes and other information that wouldn't be visible if I viewed it in an email program like Thunderbird.

I was interested in seeing the header codes in these EML files.  Those codes appeared at the tops of the files.  I felt that I could probably see what I needed to see in the first screenful of a Notepad session, opened maximized.

In other words, the concept was that I would open the EML file in Notepad; I would take a screenshot; I would save the screenshot; and then I would close the file and repeat the process with the next EML file on my list.  Then I would combine all those screenshots into one file, and flip through it or perhaps use other tools to analyze it further.  I wouldn't have to sit there, maintaining constant attention while the process continued in real time; I could just review the outcome afterwards.  (For some purposes, an alternative would have been to combine or select from the text, without a graphical view.)

The first step was to build the list of EML files that I wanted to examine.  I moved them all into a single folder and used DIR and Excel to give me the list and to convert it into a series of batch commands.  There was one such command for each such EML file.  Before running those commands, I had to open Notepad once, turn on its Format > Word Wrap option, and then close it.  The format of the command was as follows:

start /max notepad "D:\Folder Name\Email Name.eml"

That command was sufficient to open the EML file.  Next, I needed to pause the system for a moment, so that the file would have time to come onscreen. Among numerous suggestions, I favored a command involving PING ("ping 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 1500 > nul") because of its fine-tunable setting (in the example just given, 1500 milliseconds).  Unfortunately, that command's output component (" > nul") would have prevented me from adding more commands on the same line.  So I had to go with "TIMEOUT /T 1" for a one-second delay.

Next, I needed a command to take a snapshot.  It looked like there were multiple options here.  I had already installed NirCmd and had found it useful for other things, so I used this command:

start NirCmd savescreenshot "D:\Folder Name\Screenshots\Email Name.png"

NirCmd came with an option to copy its executable (nircmd.exe) to C:\Windows, so that this command could run without any need to specify the location of NirCmd, to put a copy of it in the current working folder, or to modify the computer's Path.  NirCmd wasn't saving to subfolders properly, so in the end I had to modify that part of the command.

Finally, I needed a command to close Notepad.  The advice that worked for me was:

taskkill /f /im notepad.exe

Note that this would close all currently open Notepad sessions.  These three steps (i.e., open the EML in Notepad, take a picture with NirCmd, close Notepad) would give me a screenshot of the first screenful's worth of the file's contents.  Collectively, those screenshots would give me a visual impression of the various kinds of codes appearing at the start of my EML files.

I used && to combine multiple commands on the same line, as a single (long) batch command. If that had failed, I could have added index columns next to the spreadsheet columns in which I built those two commands, with alternating even and odd numbers in those columns:  1 for the first Notepad command, 2 for the first NirCmd command, 3 for the second Notpad command, and so forth.  These index numbers would allow the various commands to be sorted into proper sequence in a single column, for copying and pasting into a batch file.

In short, for each EML file, I combined four commands with &&, into a single long command like this:

start /max notepad "D:\Folder Name\Email Name.eml" && timeout /t 1 && start NirCmd savescreenshot "Email Name.png" && taskkill /f /im notepad.exe

This gave me some PNGs.  Now there was the question of what to do with them.  One option was to simply stitch them together in a slideshow (using e.g., IrfanView) or a single PDF (using e.g., Acrobat).  I did a brief investigation of OCR software for that purpose.  Ultimately, I just used IrfanView, without even creating a slideshow, to arrow down through those PNGs, one at a time, at whatever pace I chose.  So I could look at whether each page came through OK.

PDF Analysis

In another project, I had a bunch of PDFs that I had created in a conversion process.  I wanted to check if the PDFs came through OK.  It would have been very slow to open them, one at a time, and page through them.  Combining them all into a single large PDF, which I could also page through, would have produced a huge file.  Also, if I was working with large PDFs or many PDFs (or both), I might have to look at huge numbers of pages.  Boredom or haste could lead me to flip past an important one-page document, while checking hundreds or thousands of less important pages.

Based on various factors (including the number of PDFs, their importance, and the time available), I decided to examine just the first page of each PDF.  I might not be able to tell if the whole document printed properly, but at least I could eliminate those instances where printing failed completely.

For this purpose, the process described in the previous section offered one possibility.  I could probably work up a set of commands to open a PDF, take a screenshot, and then close it, and then flip through the resulting screenshots.

I did not actually pursue that approach in this case, however.  Instead, I wanted to see if I could convert the PDF documents to JPG and then flip through just the first page from each such document.  If I had a hundred documents to check, I would have a hundred pages to look at -- not a thousand.  A separate post discusses that investigation.  The tool I chose was  Boxoft PDF to JPG Converter.  Another way to proceed might have been to split the PDFs first, using something like PDFsam, and then combine the PDFs of each resulting first page into a larger PDF that I could flip through.