Show HN: My embarrassingly simple printscreen weekend webapp
easyprintscreen.comI love it. Fantastic for multiple reasons.
1) I can never remember the "intuitive" keyboard combinations to do this on my mac, but I can remember "easyprintscreen"
2) Useful. I can capture my screen, draw on it, highlight issues or bugs or whatnot, and share it.
3) I know you'll keep it running because it has an obvious, lucrative business model (assuming you monitor what screens people capture for the occasional useful password, credit card numbers, stock tips, blackmailing opportunity, etc...)
Haha, there's no monitoring setup, infact there's no backend at all :)
If there's no backend, where are the images saved to? Just curious.
From looking at the source, imgur.
Sweet! Feature request: Would you expose the imgur link directly? I often want to take a screenshot and send it to someone, but I almost never need to draw on it. So getting a direct link to imgur would be perfect.
Also, would you consider removing the 5-second "Redirecting..." countdown?
EDIT: Right clicking on the image and clicking "Copy image URL" gives the imgur link.
EDIT2: When you click save, could you automatically copy the imgur link to the clipboard? That way you can save, alt-tab, and immediately paste the imgur link into email/IM/whatever.
Great work! Thanks for this.
The imgur id is in the URL after you press save :)
Not to take away from the OP but you can enable a new feature in DropBox where screenshots are immediately moved to your DropBox directory, uploaded, and a share URL is stuffed in your clipboard. A notice is given on screen and on Mac OS X you get a notification center alert. I think I also hooked it into growl.
The screenshot is only moved, not deleted. It's in the DropBox preferences — and along with this feature you enable photo syncing and all your phone taken pics get put in your DropBox folder in "Camera Uploads", or the "Screen Shots" directory. You also get a good deal of bonus space for enabling these features.
You won't have time to grab the screenshot and edit it or draw on it. It happens fast. I use Skitch, which is a screen shot collaboration and editing tool. Once done, you can drag and drop the image to DropBox and get a share URL. Or drag and drop out of any app onto "Droppings", a small "app" I wrote.
I wrote a small script that fishes out your DropBox ID, which is used as your ID in a URL ( this is done once on install ). On receipt of a resource, the script creates a directory and time stamps it. This script is wrapped up in an app that accepts drag and drop. Drop a batch of jpg and gif etc., images, and it will copy them to the DropBox public folder, and put unique URL's to imgur on your clipboard. Full support for maintaining Mac Resource forks and all that as long as you compress on the Mac.
Drag and drop a zipped or compressed set of files, and it will do it's best to look and see if they are all web displayable, extract them, and give you a set of public links. If it contains other zips, binaries, etc, the original format is maintained.
All these actions are logged. I engage with Skitch, a screenshot type app, which I've also integrated logging for and created "cron" ( Launch Items in my case ) actions to clean up the mess Skitch leaves behind. I don't use Skitch as an image storage app, so it keeping multiple copies of everything only ads confusion.
It's pretty handy. If I want to send anything to anyone, I just find it, drop it on an app in my dock, it's 99% bash, the rest is an app that is made to take a shell script and give you same basic UI controls to make a pseudo app.
I started to have tons of link rot on DropBox. Screenshots to CSS questions that I would see posted by others but the screenshots were long since deleted.
My ~/DropBox/Public/drops/date-stamp/the-files.{html, htm, CSS, jpg, gif, png, tif, eps…etc. } directory has been filling up from this droplet for two years now. I think I have about 500MB of stuff that will forever resolve.
I do remove huge files via a "find" command that looks for specific things that I would not want in DropBox beyond a certain date or that I know were meant for specific people and the file will never be needed again. Sort of how I do IMAP image attachment maintenance in gmail but have to use a desktop app to remove attachments.
Hey Biturd seems like you're using a lot of screenshots in your workflow but what are they for? Product development? I only stumbled upon this as a side project and would like to see how it fits in with people. thx
I think you could be clearer that 'Save' uploads the screenshot to your site, and does not (as I assumed) open a Save-as prompt.
I really suggest you give some warning that this saves to a public site, I hit save and had my email in the background, thankfully there was no private information on screen.
This gave me quite a panic, please fix it or else someone else will make a bigger mistake.
My apologies, I've added it to the save button now.
Thanks. I forgot to mention in my panicky state that I really liked the app, nice work.
Great work! It might be helpful to show images of common keyboards to show where the print screen button is. For example, on my keyboard it's labeled PrtScn. I've had to explain hundreds of times where the print screen key is. https://www.google.com/search?q=keyboard+images&oq=keyboard+...
To make it even more dead simple, you may even want to show a video. I'm not kidding.
I don't think that it is clear to a user what to do here? What does "this keyboard shortcut" mean? What should a user do once they get the image in there? The paintbrushes should be labeled better? Then what?
I believe this tool has legs and is a bigger deal than you think.
Skitch is bulky. Dropbox/Cloud.app are great, but too simple.
There's definitely middle ground for quick annotation, without going crazzzyyyy. If you can screenshot, annotate, and upload in 5-8 seconds, you've got my $$.
Thanks! I'll add more tools this weekend and polish it up a bit. How much would one be willing to pay for something like?
I installed a full application to do this the last time I needed annotated screenshots that didn't look like they were made by a child. I used Jing fwiw.
I wonder, on my macbook I always did cmd+shift+3 or cmd+shift+4 without hitting ctrl.
I am not sure if there is a difference, if not maybe you can simplify the message :)
Without ctrl, the print screen is saved on your Desktop as a PNG. With ctrl, the screenshot is copied to the clipboard.
ah awesome thanks :)
I'm assuming you don't keep people's screenshots to sell to the highest bidder. ;)
This has a lot of bones but no flesh. All I can do is a mark up a picture with really think ink.
The only thing this seems to be is a picture paster with save to server function that can be linked to using a short url.
Also, ink55 has other nifty small tools.
Loved it. Combine with browser version/OS/etc and let the user send the info directly to the person who requested it. There's a company doing something like that here on HN, but I couldn't find it.
How do you delete something saved to Imgur? Need to have that option available.
Doesn't work for me on Safari version 6.0.5 (8536.30.1) on OS X 10.8.4
I ran into a security error 18 with Safari after pasting the image from clipboard and running the data through Canvas .getDataURL(). Perhaps Safari devs could make an exception for clipboard images?
Same for Safari v 6.1.
On mac, Cmd+Ctrl+Shift+4 will work with this for regions. If you hit space before selecting anything, you can select by window.
This is nice, as I rarely want to capture my whole screen.
Nothing to be embarrassed about. This is excellent. I can already see this being useful for our less technical users who need help reporting issues.
Very cool. It frustrates me to no end when users send a docx file containing screenshots.
As a precaution, I minimized everything. :)
I like that you can edit after you've saved it. Doesn't matter if it's simple if it's intuitive and works.
Fantastic. Can see applications in technical support. You could easily enough combine with support details functionality.
I'm a bit confused. I can only manage to screen shot the website itself. How do I, say, screenshot my desktop?
I like it. I only wish there was the option to crop an image. Especially useful for people with multiple monitors.
Also the ability to crop off or to blur out/cover up anything that the user does not want shown
Yeah, I've apparently accidentally just uploaded a screenshot of some closed source code to imgur...
newsmaster posted: "The imgur id is in the URL after you press save :)" so you could go delete it off there?
Doesn't WFM :( (Firefox + Linux)
Oops, I tested on Win+Mac. Guess I'll be downloading linux then.
i think linux doesnt save the image in the clipboard after you pushed the button, in ubuntu however a dialog is displayed after pushing the button that allow you to copy the screenshot to the clipboard, but this tool is specially designed for this purpose. AFAIK this wont work out of the box in linux :(
Well I guess that's expected behavior. So you may need to explicitly state that the feature works if you save an image on your clipboard -- not just pressing printscreen ;-)
nice work for a weekend app!
You could run up a machine on susestudio and use that via the online VNC[-like ?] interface.
You only need Shift + Command + 3 (no need for Control) to screenshot. Makes it much easier!
Yeah, you could actually mess up a workflow. The current instructions would over-write your clipboard, maybe you had something you needed in it really bad.
I use a clipboard manager which is nice, and past copies are saved for a defined few hours or additional entries.
I guess i am not the only one who checked my whole screen before trying out the web app :)
I guess i am not the only one who checked my whole screen after trying out the web app :/
It supports multiple monitors. Windows 7 Pro 64-bit + Firefox 25.0.
Nice, Can you add a progress bar for larger uploads?
I was halfway creating a progress bar when I thought the design sucked so I kept it simple, but yes coming weekend a progress bar will be made.
This is a great little MVP, nice work. very useful
Didn't work for me. Mac + Chrome.
Ignore me. PEBKAC.
Have you seen on paste.com?