Publish screenshots (almost) with one click

Sometimes an instrument comes to hand precisely at the moment when a need arises. Something like this happened 15 minutes ago with a service for quickly publishing screenshots of scrnshots.com.

From time to time there is a need to transmit to the person you are chatting or correspondence what is currently on your monitor. Such a “photograph” is usually perceived easier than a verbal explanation, and indeed, the easiest way to convey the context of the work environment is simply to show what it is about.

As a rule, to transfer a screenshot, you need to perform a simple but tedious chain of actions. Click Print Screen, open a graphical editor, create a new document in it, insert the copied image into it, crop (if necessary) the excess, save it in a format suitable for transmission over the network, go to the browser with some image hosting, click the Browse button for a long time and it’s boring to wander through folders, download the desired file, and only after that get a link to copy to chat or somewhere else.

And why not reduce these actions to two or three that really require human intervention? Namely, select the photographed area of ​​the desktop, click the publish confirmation button and get the finished URL of the picture.

That's exactly what the creators of the already mentioned scrnshots.com did.. A screenshot is taken by a special client program (there are versions for Mac and Windows) and consists of two operations.

1. Selecting the desired area:

2. Optional commenting and arranging tags by which you can later organize your screenshots on the server:

Immediately after loading, the client offers to open a screenshot page in a browser from which you can extract a permalink of the form:
www.scrnshots.com/users/dreikanter/screenshots/11857


Here, in fact, all the basic functionality service. I will supplement the review with a few subjective comments regarding the implementation:

• The process of loading a screenshot could be made even more minimalistic by reducing the contents of the dialog box to two buttons - Upload and Cancel. This would be justified, because most users are still too lazy to place tags. The secondary cataloging function can be completely transferred to the web UI without loss.
• Screenshot addresses could be made shorter to make it easier to post to Twitter or dictate (if, God forbid, need it) by phone. Obviously unnecessary details in the above address can be called "users /", "screenshots /" and the completely meaningless " double-double-double ". In addition, the ID can be written in some more concise form than the number in decimal notation.
  The username, apparently, also does not have a serious functional load, because the numbering of pictures is end-to-end, but its presence in the address (presumably) can be justified by the social component of the service. when the address has a name, it’s immediately clear to whom the screenshot belongs.
• And the most important omission: they forgot to make a hotkey. Or you didn’t document it, as a result of which you need to make two such long and boring clicks, calling the context menu command from the tray.

Less significant (or too global) comments and suggestions: the clumsy glamor on the pages is redundant, a simple tool should have a simple design; the client would be very good if he knew how to work with user FTP servers; the Copy button is requested next to the generated HTML code for embed.

And the social component, by and large, is not needed there. She only distracts her noise from the main simple and beautiful idea of ​​the service - “screenshot-in-the-web-one-button”. Moreover, commenting on pictures is much more logical with the help of external tools (blogs, social networks and chats, for which these screenshots are laid out).

Related Links

• Description of the API service (yes, it is!).
• Customer registration and  download page .

Crosspost from the paradigm.ru blog .

Update: Continuing the theme of publishing screenshots with one click .