Skitch: The Mac Blogger’s Best Screenshot Tool

Earlier today, David Silversmith highlighted the importance of using images in your blog and using those images to convey information to the readers.

However, capturing and editing images can be a time consuming task. Not only is grabbing a screenshot something of an art unto itself, manipulating it and uploading it can seem to be more trouble than it is worth.

Fortunately, Mac users have a single application that can do all three functions within the same windows. It’s name is Skitch and, best of all, it is completely free during the beta period.

If you have a Mac, take screenshots and haven’t tried Skitch, you need to do so right now.

Taking Images

When Skitch is minimzed, there are three different image capture modes, a full screen capture, a crosshair capture and a webcam capture. Each of them have a designated function and ideal use.

1. Full Snapshot The full screen capture simply takes a picture of the entire screen, including your dock, open windows, etc. and then puts it as an image into Skitch for further editing. This is most useful for taking images of your desktop.
2. Crosshair Snapshot: The crosshair screenshot tool lets you select the area you want to capture, ranging from just a few pixels to almost the entire screen. This is great for grabbing images of logos, grabbing portions of a Web page or taking a screenshot from an online video clip.
3. Camera Snapshot: The camera grab works with your webcam, either built in or external, to take pictures from it and drop them into Skitch. This feature is not very robust but works well for quick grabs from your webcam to send to friends or post online.
4. Frame Snapshot: Finally, there is a “hidden” feature of Skitch called the frame capture, this is found under the Skitch menu in the main window. What it does is allow you to take an image of a specific size, for example if you need it for layout purposes, and is great for taking images for thumbnails, avatars or anything that has to be a specific size.

No matter which type of snapshot you use, once the image is taken it is opened up in the main Skitch window, where it is available for editing.

Editing Images

Skitch provides a variety of tools for quickly adding information to an image. Though is is not a replacement for Photoshop or another dedicated image editor, most simple edits to an image can be done in Skitch including cropping, adding text, drawing on the image (boxes, lines, arrows, etc.) and erasing/transparency.

What Skitch can not do, at least not that I’ve been able to find, is merge multiple images together or in layers. Every snap and every paste is treated as a new image. This means that, while Skitch will be able to help grab a series of logos, it won’t help create a collage of them or overlay other images on top of them.

However, it is trivial to use Skitch to highlight a significant portion of an image by drawing a box or a circle around it, using arrows to illustrate an important element, write text over the image or color over portions that you don’t want to show (such as personal information).

As light as the editing tools are, they can still go a long way to adding some character and information to your images.

Uploading

Finally, once the image is ready, Skitch is capable of exporting the image into a variety of formats, including PNG, JPG, GIF and more, and then either saving it to your computer or uploading it straight to your server.

Skitch works with its own Skitch.com service, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Flickr and MobileMe. The only major providers missing are Amazon S3, Photobucket, Picasa and, perhaps, ImageShack. Best of all, if you set up the accounts correctly, Skitch will know the URL of where you uploaded the image and can copy it to your clipboard, meaning that all you have to do is paste the URL into your your blog post, email or IM.

For uploading images, Skitch is truly an elegant solution, simplifying the process almost as much as is physically possible. Not only do you avoid having to use your FTP program, but you even avoid using WordPress’ or MovableType’s uploader. All of this is done inside Skitch with the click of a mouse.

Bottom Line

Skitch is something of a rare bird in that it does one thing and does it well, but in that process it actually handles three different tasks, screen capture, image editing and file upload.

The power of Skitch is that it takes what was a long process involving three different applications and turns it into a streamlined system involving just a single program. It can save a great deal of time and, given the cost of many of its competitors, a great deal of money as well.

If you’re a blogger that takes a lot of screenshots but aren’t using Skitch yet, it is definitely worth giving it a try. Though it has some limitations, especially in the editing department, it can take a lot of the hassle out of getting images on your site.

Written by Jonathan Bailey from Plagiarism Today
Posted on April 14th, 2009 and filed under Software & Programs
Do not forget to subscribe to our RSS feed for updates

6