Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Image Capture & It's Greyed Out Scan Button


Okay, this isn't specifically a Final Cut tip but since you may need to occasionally scan in things for FC you may find yourself inside of Apple's free Image Capture app.

If you do, and you find it working perfectly except for it's Scan button is greyed out, here's the solution:

Click in the preview window and drag out a square for it to scan from.

Yes, that's it. It's that simple. Click outside the scan marquee square you just made to start over. This had me puzzled for far too long.

21 comments:

Unknown said...

Genius! You saved me a hell of a lot of time over what i already spent trying to figure the damn thing out. :o)

Unknown said...

Thanks had me stumped for ages....

Cameron Reilly said...

Thanks Not Bruce! I spent ages trying to work that out before I found your site. Nice work, Apple. How make something confusing!

absinthegeek said...

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!!!! and thank google for letting me find this tip.

lizabeth said...

Thank you, my god apple need to sort out this. Thankyou so much!

Andy H said...

Just to add to the thanks for this - caused me so much hassle over the last few days.

JJ Ruiz said...

I'm Not Bruce too, but I give thanks to INB for this little gem... Mac OS UI FAIL!

The Paedent said...

Thank you.

Unknown said...

Thank you SO much for your help! This worked like a charm :)

hbchai said...

Thanks man! That was completely unintuitive!

amelianaire said...

Ahhhhhhhh--Thank you! I can't even believe they would do something so dumb.

ANNE BILLSON said...

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I would offer to have your babies, except that I'm past the menopause.

Steve S said...

OS X 10.5.8 PB G4
There's a way to do it in Image Capture, one I discovered by accident. Click and drag from one corner of your image.The image will turn dark except for a rectangle contained in the drag area. Drag to enclose the entire image and let go. The scan button becomes turns white and works

Steve S said...

Actually, what I found is just what you found. It's strange that there's no documentation of this in the Image Capture Help.

mat.desma9 said...

Thanks so much! I've been scratching my head for half an hour!

Unknown said...

Thank you so much.
Curses upon Apple and its philosophy of "intuitive" undocumented features.

Lisa McCarty said...

Thanks so much for posting this, and thanks to Google for being smart enough to take me here when I typed "why is the scan button greyed out in image capture?" Yay for web 2.0.

Unknown said...

Thank you. I have spent three hours downloading stuff from the internet to fix the "problem". For crying out loud.
Alex

Lisa Pecunia said...

Wow, how unfriendly is that?!? Thank you!

(Funny thing is, I even realized that the exact same thing happened to me last time I scanned something, and it's so unintuitive I didn't even remember it.)

Unknown said...

Thank you!!!

ThirtyMama said...

OMG and all day I have thought my connection was down. Thank you so much!