Its now impossible to take screenshots of Traffic Estimator

[groove30]

I tried to take a screen shot today of the traffic estimator on adwords, but google have just implemented some kind of system that scrambles the resulting jpegs. You can zoom in and see the text clearly, but in internet explorer it automatically fuzzes up the text.

Any ideas how to get around this?

Any ideas why they did it?

[bakedjake]

You sure it's not IE's auto-resizing of graphics?

[groove30]

Yep, well pretty sure anyway.

I've done it many times before and its only today that it doesn't work anymore.

I've tried manipulating the pic in photoshop, sharpening it up, taking screenshots of screenshots, cloning parts of it, resizing it in various ways...

It still has the funny distortion. I think Google has implemented some kind of anti screenshot technology...

Not sure why though!

[Moosetick]

A lot on photographers who put their stuff on the web for you to view/purchase do something like this. There is always a way around it though.

At the worst you could always take a picture of the screen with a digital camera.

[ScottG13]

I'm not seeing it. Screen caps are working for me.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

Yep - this a new one on me, for certain.

I've just pinged a colleague who is a part of the Traffic Estimator team, and she says that nothing has changed on this end.

I wonder if the Universal Odd Problem Fix will help. You may have heard the old saying "When in doubt - reboot". It has (inexplicably) worked for me countless times. ;)

AWA

[shorebreak]

It's bound to happen sooner or later, so I thought I'd allow myself the pleasure of coming up with the first conspiracy which would explain this:

Google - who has made a name for itself on Wall St for *not* giving guidance - wanted to make sure that investment types couldn't take traffic estimator seasonal trend data and use it to figure out how their quarter was going, hence the scramble.

-Shorebreak

[groove30]

Not totally sure what's happening, if nothing happened at google's end it must be my computer!

Time to get a new computer I think...

[jcmoon]

Before Google Maps had satellite photos, and before MapQuest had its aerial view, the only place I knew of to find such imagery was Microsoft's Terraserver. It was usually old imagery, black-and-white, with intermittent coverage.

The photography was generally from the USGS.

Anyway, at that time, certain photos if I hit PrintScreen and pasted into, say, PhotoShop, the screen would look normal but the area with the photo would be blank grey with an embossed USGS logo repeated within it. Now this was a site run by Microsoft, viewed in Internet Explorer, so perhaps that's no coincidence.

Quite annoying. I'm glad we've come so far past that.

[netmeg]

Since the traffic estimator (in my experience) has never even come CLOSE to an accurate estimate, why would you want a screen shot of it anyway? (Not trying to be snotty - just wondering if someone else has had better results with it than I ever have in the history of Google AdWords since day ONE)

[jimbeetle]

groove, this might not be the problem, but before running out to buy a new maching the first thing I'd do is run full virus and spyware scans.

[dj_webm]

If you can clearly see jpg in photoshop at 100% zoom - then is definetly not a jpg's fault - its unpossible (okok, not mention 'unpossible' in computer related themes, but...). Your IE must be resizing or other problem related to how IE shows jpg, but nothing to do with IE corrupting screenshot of a google :)

[Israel]

Groove,

I just did some screenshots of the Traffic Estimator on an ancient quirkly PC and they came up fine in different viewers including IE. I used a robust freeware tool I downloaded over 5 years ago.

Like Netmeg, the only thing I question is the usefullness of the data returned by the TE.

Look within your PC and its apps, IMHO, Groove -- or buy a new PC if yours is old. They're cheap now ;)

Israel