When should I use a snapshot webhook instead of screen capture?
Use the webhook when you want to take the picture yourself, at a moment of your choosing, with a hotkey — or when you are not running the desktop companion at all. Automatic capture fires at the fill; the webhook fires whenever you press the key.
They solve different problems and nothing stops you using both.
Automatic capture is unattended. You configure it once and it takes the entry and the exit of every trade without you thinking about it. That is its whole value, and its limitation is that those are the only two moments it knows about.
The webhook is deliberate. It is an address you can POST an image to, and anything on your machine that can make an HTTP request can use it. Bind it to a key in AutoHotkey, Keyboard Maestro or Hammerspoon and you have "screenshot this, file it against my open trade" on a hotkey. That is the right tool when:
- The moment that mattered was not the fill. The setup forming, the level being tested, the thing you saw and did not take.
- You are on the web app and the desktop companion is not running. The webhook does not care which program took the screenshot — it only receives an image.
- Your platform already has a screenshot keyNinjaTrader, ATAS and Sierra Chart all do — and you want those shots landing in your journal rather than in a folder you never open.
- You want a specific window, not a whole monitor. What you send is what gets attached.
The cost is that matching is by timestamp, not by trade. Automatic capture knows which trade fired it. The webhook has to work out which trade you meant, which it does by clock — see how images get attached.
