Using robot class to take screenshot - would like to reduce filesize

Question

I have a small piece of code that takes a screenshot of my desktop every five minutes - it's the work of a moment to flick thought and work out how many screenshots are of, say, facebook... It's very useful, but the directories full of screenshots are getting pretty big. I'm looking for ways to reduce the filesize of the images - I don't need them to be full perfect screenshot quality - I'd like to be able to just reduce the overall quality of the image - perhaps use a more lossy format or ask robot to save in grayscale.

I'm asking ways I can modify the below code so that the resulting images take up less filespace, and I'm willing to tolerate quite a high level of quality loss in the process.

/**
 * Code modified from code given in http://whileonefork.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/java-multi-monitor-screenshots.html following a SE question at  
 * http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10042086/screen-capture-in-java-not-capturing-whole-screen and then modified by a code review at http://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/10783/java-screengrab
 */
package com.tmc.personal;

import java.awt.AWTException;
import java.awt.GraphicsDevice;
import java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment;
import java.awt.Rectangle;
import java.awt.Robot;
import java.awt.image.BufferedImage;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.text.DateFormat;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.TimeZone;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;

import javax.imageio.ImageIO;

class ScreenCapture {

    static int minsBetweenScreenshots = 5;

    public static void main(String args[]) {
        int indexOfPicture = 1000;// should be only used for naming file...
        while (true) {
            takeScreenshot("ScreenCapture" + indexOfPicture++);
            try {
                TimeUnit.MINUTES.sleep(minsBetweenScreenshots);
            } catch (Exception e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
    }

    //from http://www.coderanch.com/t/409980/java/java/append-file-timestamp
    private  final static String getDateTime()
    {
        DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd_hh:mm:ss");
        df.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("PST"));
        return df.format(new Date());
    }

    public static void takeScreenshot(String filename) {
        Rectangle allScreenBounds = getAllScreenBounds();
        Robot robot;
        try {
            robot = new Robot();
            BufferedImage screenShot = robot.createScreenCapture(allScreenBounds);
            ImageIO.write(screenShot, "jpg", new File(filename + getDateTime()+ ".jpg"));
        } catch (AWTException e) {
            System.err.println("Something went wrong starting the robot");
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            System.err.println("Something went wrong writing files");
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }

    /**
     * Okay so all we have to do here is find the screen with the lowest x, the
     * screen with the lowest y, the screen with the higtest value of X+ width
     * and the screen with the highest value of Y+height
     * 
     * @return A rectangle that covers the all screens that might be nearby...
     */
    private static Rectangle getAllScreenBounds() {
        Rectangle allScreenBounds = new Rectangle();
        GraphicsEnvironment ge = GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment();
        GraphicsDevice[] screens = ge.getScreenDevices();

        int farx = 0;
        int fary = 0;
        for (GraphicsDevice screen : screens) {
            Rectangle screenBounds = screen.getDefaultConfiguration().getBounds();
            // finding the one corner
            if (allScreenBounds.x > screenBounds.x) {
                allScreenBounds.x = screenBounds.x;
            }
            if (allScreenBounds.y > screenBounds.y) {
                allScreenBounds.y = screenBounds.y;
            }
            // finding the other corner
            if (farx < (screenBounds.x + screenBounds.width)) {
                farx = screenBounds.x + screenBounds.width;
            }
            if (fary < (screenBounds.y + screenBounds.height)) {
                fary = screenBounds.y + screenBounds.height;
            }
            allScreenBounds.width = farx - allScreenBounds.x;
            allScreenBounds.height = fary - allScreenBounds.y;
        }
        return allScreenBounds;
    }
}

Answer 1

Why not simply scale the image you receive:

  BufferedImage img = robot.createScreenCapture(allScreenBounds);

  // scaledWidth and scaledHeight are the new smaller image size
  Image scaledImg = img.getScaledInstance(scaledWidth, scaledHeight,
        BufferedImage.SCALE_AREA_AVERAGING);

If you need the new image to be a BufferedImage, then:

  BufferedImage scaledBufferedImg = new BufferedImage(scaledWidth, scaledHeight,
        BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB);
  Graphics g = scaledBufferedImg.getGraphics();
  g.drawImage(scaledImg, 0, 0, null);
  g.dispose();

Answer 2

In addition to scaling the image per Hovercraft Full of Eels answer, you can experiment with setting the jpeg quality to something less than the default:

Iterator iter = ImageIO.getImageWritersByFormatName("jpeg");
ImageWriter writer = (ImageWriter)iter.next();
ImageWriteParam iwp = writer.getDefaultWriteParam();
iwp.setCompressionMode(ImageWriteParam.MODE_EXPLICIT);
iwp.setCompressionQuality(0.5);   // integer between 0 and 1

Also, depending on the type of screenshots you are taking, you might find some file size reduction by using a different image file format based on palettes, such as PNG(8-bit) or GIF. These formats can use less file size as compared to jpeg when the image contains limited set of colors that occur in frequent blocks of the same color. ...like many traditional GUI application screenshots.