Blogging Tips

There are lots of ways to share images from your digital camera and mobile phone on Twitter, but how about while surfing on the web? You’d usually have to go through a process of saving the image to your computer, then uploading it to an image sharing site and finally posting it to Twitter. Well, Rosa.ly is here to make this task a lot easier for you. It’s a totally free site that lets you quickly share web images on Twitter.

Rosa.ly uses Twitter OAuth, so you won’t need to enter your credentials to login. From there it’s simple. You will need to either install the Firefox extension or add the bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar.

Firefox Extension

Once you add the Firefox extension, you’ll have a new option on your right click menu. Just right click on any image and navigate to “Share Image on Twitter“. Depending on options that other extensions have added, you may have a lot sift through when trying to find the option, but it will be there.

Once you click on it, a small window will pop up allowing you to sign into Twitter (if you aren’t already). Then you can enter your tweet and/or hashtags (explained below). There is a check box that says “Do not post to Twitter“; this of course gives you the option to post or not post the image to Twitter. Click on “Share It” and you’re done.

When someone clicks on the link from your tweet, they’ll see a little bit of info about the image on the right hand side. They can view the original image as well as see the source, size, date posted and current views of the image. They’ll also be able to leave a comment. As a test, I left a comment and it appears that the comment only stays on Rosa.ly and is not posted to Twitter.

Bookmarklet

Now the bookmarklet is a little bit different. Once you add it to your bookmarks toolbar, you can click it while browsing any website. Once you do, all images will get a blue border around them (as seen below) so, you’ll need to click on the actual image that you want to share. Once you click on it, you’ll be taken to Rosa.ly to enter your tweet and/or hashtags to share. From there everything is the same as using the Firefox extension.

Organization

Rosa.ly also lets you organize your shared images by adding hastags (#keyword). Each hashtag should be separated with  a space. How many can you add? As many that will fit into 140 characters.

This is a really smart and useful service that will definitely save you some time when sharing images on the web. It really doesn’t get any easier than pointing and clicking. Is this a tool that you will use?