How can I take a screenshot and then send it in an email with Automator?

Question

I run some tests on my Mac that take several hours. When the tests are done, I want to send myself an email with a screenshot of the test results.

Here is how I configured my Automator App:

1. New mail message (to me, subject: tests done, message: here are the results)
2. Take screenshot (type: full screen, main monitor only, save to Desktop: latest-test-results)
3. Add attachments to front message
4. Send outgoing message

This doesn't work because when the screenshot is taken, the Mail app is already open and covering Terminal, which is showing the test results.

So I next tried this:

1. Take screenshot (type: full screen, main monitor only, save to Clipboard)
2. New mail message (to me, subject: tests done, message: here are the results)
3. Get contents of clipboard
4. Add attachments to front message
5. Send outgoing message

For some reason, this action sends me an attachment that is a zip file containing the files on my desktop, but not the screenshot, which is apparently not saved to the desktop. I don't want a zip file; I want the actual screenshot, and obviously I don't want all the files on my desktop.

This seems like a simple task... what am I doing wrong? I want to take a screenshot and then email it to myself. The Automator app is triggered through a bash script that runs the tests.

macOS Ventura.

Answer 1

So, I configured it as such, and it worked. It's saving to a file called "test". You could trash it after sending if you wanted too. This is all in automator, but if you're wrapping it in bash you could use the screencapture command to capture the image first, then trigger the automation to send it. Something like:

screencapture ~/desktop/out.png

Here's the working config:

This produced this email (I had this question up in Safari), and you can see that it's not covered with the email window: