If you are just about to set up your account and still a little foggy about where to begin then the below 7 steps should provide some solid confidence in getting you going.
1. Set up your Account and basic preferences
Create an account and choose a name for your team. Invite your teammates to join. And most importantly, pick a root folder for all your screenshots. Sign up here.
Sign up for a free account to get started
Pick an email (we recommend you use your company email) and password to create a set of unique credentials. For security purposes, we'll send you a verification code to finalize the setup. It should arrive in a few seconds. Once verified we push you into the App and open up a basic set of preferences below.
Fill in your Name
May we ever so politely suggest you use your real name, given this is what we show to other teammates around the platform. Giving you proper credit for updates and edits. You are the hero around here.
Pick a team name
If you are an admin (the first team user to sign up is automatically an admin) you should see a Team Settings section and your first task is to pick a name. This should be your company name. We'll use this name to suggest a cloud folder name, but you can edit that further down the page.
Add team members
No harm in adding team members right away, but depending on their eagerness, you might want to set up your first product, editions, and a handful of features to start (this getting started guide) and then invite them into something with a bit more meat.
Name your root Screenshot folder
We save all captured screenshots to the cloud in a customizable and easy-to-understand folder structure. You are naming the "team name" part of the folder structure below:
... / team name / product name / screenshot mode / filename .PNG
Skipping CMS Integration and Subscription
We'll get to this later, and the tool is all FREE for now, so no stress on the subscription front.
2. Create your first Product
Get started by creating a Product. Each product will have a few editions that contain all your features. Each feature can be set up for automated screenshots.
Add a Product Name
Type (or more likely copy paste from your website) the Product Name, Tagline, and Description. While you might not initially use LaunchBrightly as a source of truth for your product content, we highly recommend you apply a little care as we use this naming across the system.
Add the Web App URL
Each product is likely to live on its own URL, such as app.companyname.com or similar. Be careful to not paste in other information at the end of the URL.
Add Access for gated Products.
Most products live behind a login and password, and for our screenshot automation servers to get access we need either a login and password or an authentication token to your demo account.
*we should all have the perfect demo account with shareable data and perfectly populated data that best showcase the value of our tools. if you are not there yet, don't stress it, we are all working on it!
Choose what screenshots you want us to capture
We initially provide 4 types of screenshots, with "Desktop - Light mode" being mandatory. Don't sweat this choice, as it's all automated, so you can go back anytime and extend this as we'll rerun the process and capture all new screenshots.
Name your Product Screenshot folder
We save all captured screenshots to the cloud in a customizable and easy-to-understand folder structure. You are naming the "product name" part of the folder structure below:
... / team name / product name / screenshot mode / filename .PNG
Save your Product
You can always go back and edit the Product by clicking its name in the top left navigation area.
3. Create one or more Editions
Add an Edition to your new Product. Each Edition is primarily determined by its pool of features — and is typically marketed under a distinct price point. Think of it as a set of buckets to hold all your features.
Add an Edition Name
Type (or more likely, copy-paste from your website) the Edition Name and Description. While you might not initially use LaunchBrightly as a source of truth for your product content, we highly recommend you apply a little care as we use the Edition name across the system. As a simple example, we have three editions at LaunchBrightly: Free, Startup, and Business.
Given the ease with which you can set up new editions, we encourage you to create all your editions, even if you don't yet fill them up with Features.
Save your Edition
You can always go back and edit the Edition details by clicking its name in the kanban board header.
4. Create a handful of Features
Add a new Feature to one of the Editions of the Product. Each Feature often belongs to multiple Editions, and not unlikely all Editions for foundational features.
Add a Feature Name
Type (or more likely, copy-paste from your website or prior feature launch documentation) the Feature Name and Description. While you might not initially use LaunchBrightly as a source of truth for your Feature content, we highly recommend you apply a little care as we use the Feature name across the system and push it into any integrations you might connect.
Turn on automated screenshots
The meat of the matter and likely the reason you are here today. Turn on automated screenshots to open up the configuration.
Add the URL Directory for the Feature
We take the Web App URL (from the above Product setup) and add the URL directory for the Feature to get to a full usable link, which our servers can visit to capture the screenshot. You are inputting the "Feature Directory" part of the URL structure below:
https:// Web App URL / Feature Directory
This could be e.g. "style" (no prepending "/" needed) for the https://app.launchbrightly.com/style feature of our tool. You can click the open URL icon to check if you got it right.
Identify the Feature on the page using an HTML Selector
This task is perhaps the most technical part of the setup, and for that, we are sorry. If you are familiar with HTML, you can quickly scan option A and B below.
A) It could be as simple as asking the Frontend-Engineer owning the Feature to communicate the HTML id Attribute surrounding it.
<div id="styleFeature"> ... </div>
In a reverse manner, it could also be part of the internal prep process for a new feature launch. The Marketing, Product, or Support team (whoever runs LaunchBrightly) makes up an ID and asks the Frontend-Engineer to simply inserts it.
An ID is characterized with a # in front of it when you add the selector; so you would write "#styleFeature" for the above example.
B) This is likely where you will start, and while it sounds even geekier, it'll probably be easier as you are in full control. Go to the page where the feature lives and "right-click" the area where it resides and "Inspect Element" (the Feature is essentially an element on the page). You can now hover over the HTML (even if you do not have detailed knowledge) and see parts of the screen highlighted (see picture). As you find the area to capture, see what identifiers (IDs, Classes, or Data Attributes) are available for you to copy. Say we wanted to capture the editions relationship feature (picture), we spot that it lives under a "class" called editionsrelationships and we can use that (try always to look for IDs first as they are considered to be unique).
A Class is characterized with a period "." in front of it when you add the selector; so you would write ".editionsrelationships"
You can test if you got it right by manually asking for a screenshot on the Screenshots page of LaunchBrightly.
Give your file a name
We save all captured screenshots to the cloud in a customizable and easy-to-understand folder structure. You are naming the "filename" part of the file location below (.PNG gets appended automatically):
... / team name / product name / screenshot mode / filename .PNG
Edition relationship
A feature must belong to at least one Edition and will most likely belong to multiple editions if not all. You can skip the content-focused Constraint, Limit, and Speed info for later, but we recommend that you add the Feature to the actual Editions it belongs to for optimal discovery around LaunchBrightly.
Save your Feature
You should see the Feature arrive in all of the Editions it belongs to. You can always go back and edit the Feature details by clicking it in the Board or Table views.
5. Tune the Styling
Time to put in place beautiful styling for your screenshots of this Product. Both RAW and Styled versions are saved to the cloud.
Hint (flipping through preview images)
You can flip through styling preview images using the small icon in the Style toolbox header. If you are yet to run the automated screenshot process, we'll show a sample SaaS product feature image.
Adjust the Margin and the background color
The primary purpose of any Margin is often to make sure your image does not suffocate (cramped together with text or other images, when used). It can also help force the screenshot onto a fixed color background* of your choice. Furthermore, it provided room for a shadow should you choose to add that (make sure you do not cut off the shadow prematurely with a margin too small).
*you can make the background transparent making the screenshot more versatile, but if you have a lot of external people use your product images it might be mismanaged (ending up not looking as awesome as you had hoped for).
Decide on rounded Corners
For a lot of designs rounded corners help draw the attention and focus to the center vs sharp corners, which do the complete opposite of this, drawing the eye away from the center. We are fans of slightly rounded corners.
Turn Shadows On (or Off)
We are mildly obsessed with shadows around here and when they are done well, they're magic. They provide depth, contrast, and clarity to the image and the page it is placed on. You can adjust the Blur, Color, and Offsets. It is an art, but we get you started with parameters similar to how MacOS does shadows on manual screenshots.
Note: You might immediately think NO shadows are needed as you'll just apply them in CSS later to the RAW images which we also save. We would recommend against this, as you are likely to a) lose some of the consistency across all images as you do not have a central place to control styling, and b) you are often unable to style images e.g. help desk tool, real-time chat, etc.
Save your customized Style
Save the Style parameters to the Product. Remember, this is not saved on a per Feature basis, and as you flip through images, they only serve as previews for what it would look like. This is by design (no pun intended) as you want consistency above all (same style for all feature images).
Have in mind that saving a style doesn't do anything instantly, the styling is applied on the next run of the screenshot process.
EXTRA / Upload single image to style
You can skip this for now, but did you know that you can upload and do one-off styling of images? Hover over the lower right-hand corner (page flip) and click upload image.
6. Run the Automated Screenshots Process
This is what you waited for. Run the process to see your Features being fetched from your App, styled according to your template, and saved to the cloud.
Confirm Automated Screenshots are ON
At this point, you must have turned on Automated Screenshots for at least one of your Features (See Section 4 on how to do this). Any new feature which you have just set up and which is yet to be fetched and processed will be depictured as an empty image on this page. If you see empty images. You are in good form!
Run Screenshot Process for any outstanding Features
Use the camera button in the top right-hand corner to start the process, it shows how many features are in line to be fetched. Each feature is likely to have multiple screenshot modes requested. We also show the RAW image fetched, so you have access to that along the styled versions.
Reprocess All (aka Run Screenshot Process for ALL)
If all you see in the upper right-hand corner is "Reprocess All" that suggests you already have screenshots captured, styled, saved to the cloud, and that there are no outstanding new features in line. In other words, all is good and no action is needed.
Now, having said that, and while this is time-consuming (in time to run) and quite rare, there are honest situations where this is exactly what you want to do. And where we shine. Imagine a change to your navigation, a change to your app font, or some cross-app branding changes. A color change and a new type of buttons, etc. Or a screenshot style template change. All items that require, pretty much, new screenshots of everything. Clicking one button to do this, is as close to magic as we can get.
Reprocess distinct features
When you make changes to your product and you would like to see new images fetched and saved to the cloud. Hover over any Feature-image (screenshot) and click the bottom info box. You'll see options become available and you can click the Camera icon to run the process for this single feature.
Reminder
These screenshots are saved to our CDN (a globally-distributed network of servers that cache your content close to the user). On the first run, you see them almost immediately, on reruns, you might still see the old ones as it can take time to push this to the edge. If you go to the feature screen and click on the feature, we will show you what we have in our DB and what is in the midst of being pushed to all corners of the world.
7. Embed a screenshot on your marketing and support sites
Add live cloud Screenshots to your website for continuous integration. And run the screenshot process and see images automatically update on your sites.
Example CMS
We will use Webflow CMS as an example below, but any marketing website, support system, and similar can be replaced in its place of course.
Linking to a Screenshot versus uploading a Screenshot.
A quick note before we start. We've been trained to upload static product images to our marketing and support systems. However, when you upload a product screenshot to Webflow, WordPress, Zendesk, etc. (using drag-and-drop, or your file explorer) you are making a bet that this snapshot, this very moment in time, will never change. Which is obviously never true. Think of this as the inevitable slow image rot that comes attached to static uploads. It's like taking a screenshot of your bank account and using that as the backdrop for your future budgeting process.
Copy Screenshot URL
To create a live link to a product screenshot by clicking the feature image in question on the Screenshots page. The image opens in a new window on the proper live cloud URL and you can simply copy it from the URL line in your browser. You can also go to the table view, add a filter or sort, to make it easier to find the image and copy it from the "Public URLs" column using the copy icon . The full link* will be formatted as such:
The above will provide you a URL which you can paste directly into a browser to see, but you job it onto a web page and for that, you are probably using it for one of your IMG tags, writing something like this:
This is all good, but if you are not comfortable in writing HTML, or even if you just want a speedier embed with an anal IMG tag setup (which we care a lot about) you can copy a full IMG HTML tag that you can embed as is.
Head over to the table view on the Screenshots page, find your Feature, and copy a tag ready to embed from the "Public URLs" column using the copy image icon . You'll get something like this (simplified)
<img class="lb-feature" loading="lazy" title="feature name text ..." alt="feature description text ..." src="https://screenshot.launchbrightly.com/team/product/mode/file.PNG">
Live Linking using a Screenshot URL or populated <IMG> tag
Now that you have a live link in hand, whether just a URL or a fully populated IMG tag, it is time to do what you came here to do. Embed this on your site.
In Webflow (our example CMS) the immediate difference is that you do not click into your image assets. Instead, you want to add an "Embed Component" [ ] which allows you to write custom HTML code. This sounds dramatic, but should you have copied the populated IMG tag, you simply paste this in the "Custom Code" window. That is it.
Save and close your Webflow Embed Panel
As you save and exit, you should immediately see a live and linked product screenshot on the page. As per previous comments, we highly recommend you pick the styled version (see reasons above). Of course, you still need to apply your usual page styling. No change there.
Warning on "Add by URL"
in many CMS and support systems, can confusingly mean copy an image from that URL and upload it to your CMS and we are back where we started. A static image.
Tip: If you go into your uploaded image assets library of Webflow (or any other of your web destinations) and you spot a screenshot of one of your SaaS Product Features. You have a candidate for upgrade to automation, as it should really be a live link. Be vigilant about this.
Integration, we'll leave this for later. BUT...
Integration directly with Webflow is on the short-term horizon, so all of the LIVE URLs are directly available inside your website builder, including the ability to auto feature pages, etc. This is the direction you would ultimately want to go in.
Tip: If you go into your uploaded image assets library of Webflow (or any other of your web destinations) and you spot a screenshot of one of your SaaS Product Features. You have a candidate for upgrade to automation, as it should really be a live link. Be vigilant about this.
Closing comments
You have transcended to a different dimension. Doing this on a few images probably doesn't make sense, like moving two tasks managed in a spreadsheet to Jira. You should go all in, as the more features you describe, connect (identity) and live link to your web destinations, the more you win.
