Pixel and image triggers

A trigger makes a session conditional: watch the screen for one or more things, and act when one shows up. Auto Clicker and Key Presser both have one; only Auto Clicker offers Click it, because a click is the one action that can be placed at a found target.

The panel asks two questions in order, and it is worth answering them in that order.

1 · What should ClickTray watch for?

Up to sixteen targets, of four kinds. Every one of them is another search on every check, so add what you need and no more.

• Capture an image — drag a box around something on screen. ClickTray photographs it and looks for it again later.
• Add images from files — the same thing, from images you already have.
• Add a colour — a colour to find anywhere in the search area, rather than at a fixed point.
• Watch one spot — one exact screen coordinate and the colour it should be. The cheapest check there is, and the right choice when the thing you are watching never moves.

With more than one target, the trigger fires on whichever is found — which is how you cover a button that has two states, or three different things worth reacting to.

2 · Where to look

Follow a window picks a window and uses its rectangle. The search area and every click move with this window as you move or resize it, which is the setting that stops a trigger breaking the first time somebody drags something.

Draw an area is a fixed box you drag once.

You want one of them. Without a search area every check scans your entire screen, which is slow and more likely to match the wrong thing — and the panel says so rather than letting you find out.

What it does when it finds something

Three actions:

• Click it — clicks wherever a target is found, every time it is found. This replaces the panel's own Where to click settings, and the panel says so on that section rather than leaving you to work it out.
• Keep running while one is there — runs only while at least one target is on screen, and stops as soon as they all disappear.
• Stop when one appears — runs while no target is on screen, and stops the moment one shows up.

In Click it mode each target can carry its own click type — left, double, triple, right, right double or middle — or Use run settings to inherit the panel's. That is the left-click-this, right-click-that case, and it is per target rather than global.

Two more options in that mode, both of which exist because of a specific failure:

• Click every one it finds. When several targets are on screen at once, click them all in turn instead of just the first. Costs a little more per check.
• Click each thing only once. Click when something appears, then leave it alone until it goes away and comes back. Without it, anything that stays on screen gets clicked over and over — including something that merely looks like your target. Something that moves counts as new again.

Tolerance and size

Colour tolerance is one number from 0 to 255, applied to every target. Raise it if a target is not being found; lower it if the wrong thing is matching.

Allow for size differences appears once you have an image target, and it is the setting to reach for when a capture that looks right finds nothing:

Each step is another full pass over the frame, which is why the default is exact.

How often it looks

The search runs at a low, visible rate — five times a second by default. Searching a large region for an image is the expensive part, which is the whole reason the search area matters.

Screens, scaling and DPI

This is the failure mode. A trigger is stored with the resolution and display scaling it was captured at. Replay a profile on a different monitor, or after changing scaling, and the coordinates no longer mean what they meant. ClickTray warns you when it spots the mismatch — it never silently blocks the run.

A captured image is matched at the scaling it was taken at, so a scaling change is the most common reason an image trigger stops firing. That is what Allow for size differences exists for.

What usually goes wrong

It never fires. In order: check you set a search area, raise the colour tolerance, then try Small differences. A capture that is mostly background is also worth redoing tighter.

It fires on the wrong thing. Lower the tolerance, or capture a target with more contrast in it. A large flat area of one colour matches badly everywhere.

It clicks the same wrong thing forever. Turn on Click each thing only once. A trigger that latches onto something the right colour but the wrong object never stops matching it, because it never stops being there.

Clicks land somewhere unexpected. In Click it mode the trigger owns the click position, and the Where to click settings are not used. That is by design.

It is slow to keep up with something moving. Turn off Curved cursor travel in Natural movement — the cursor walks a path to every new target, and that is usually the delay you are seeing.