Drag and Drop Uploading With Safari ‘Choose File’ Buttons
Posted by: Brian in Skitch Usage TipsThe Safari browser has some great things going for it. One of the aspects that we really love here at plasq HQ is it’s seamless interaction with the Skitch desktop application.
As you use Skitch more often, you may be continually surprised by the different things you can do with the application. A neat tip that we want to pass on today is the fact that you can use the ‘drag me’ tab to painlessly drag-and-drop images from Skitch directly onto the ‘choose file’ upload buttons of most, if not all, websites when you use the Safari browser to view the site.
Why is this so great? Well, just think about the old way of doing things…
THE OLD WAY
In the pre-Skitch days you needed to:
1) Create an image
2) Save it to your hard drive
3) Click the ‘choose file’ button in Safari
4) Browse your hard drive to find the image you just saved
5) Upload the file
How much time would this take you? Ugh… no thanks.
THE SKITCH WAY
With an image loaded in Skitch, all you need to do is:
1) Click and drag the ‘dragme’ tab, drop on the ‘choose file’ button
2) OK the upload process using the UI of the site you are uploading to.
How much simpler could it be? 2 seconds and you’re done.
EXAMPLES
Let’s say you attended an event that was organized via Facebook and now you want to upload some pictures of all your friends who attended. How to upload an image to an event page in Facebook using Skitch.
Do you use Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, or any of the hundreds of other sites that allow you to place an avatar into your account profile? Maybe you change that avatar every once in awhile? How to upload an avatar icon to your Twitter account using Skitch.
So go out and experiment with the sites that you use daily, we’re certain you can find many more ways to use the drag-and-drop aspects of Skitch to make your image uploading much less painful than in the pre-Skitch era.
Please leave comments if you find some nifty new ways to use Skitch.
Tags: avatars, facebook pictures, jaiku, pownce, skitch drag me, skitch uploading, Twitter

Entries (RSS)
April 16th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
This is excellent.
Now how to make it work with Campfire who doesn’t use a button for their choose image? They use a link. Meh.
April 16th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
That’s easy Scott, we have people using Campfire who love Skitch, just use the embed link, or other link types available on Skitch.com.
It does mean that you need to upload to skitch.com first, but hey that’s pretty quick and we’re going to give you more reasons to visit skitch.com in the near future anyway, so while you might gain a couple seconds in required time to use, you’ll gain more options and a richer experience. We plan to make the Skitch app even more useful also, so just watch this space….I know you want new Skitch stuff yesterday Scott but just be patient a wee bit longer dude
-Brian
April 17th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
@scott - actually, you can do it as explained above in the post. See additional direction here:
http://skitch.com/atariboy/j2it/skitch-to-campfire
April 24th, 2008 at 6:22 am
And I thought it was cool when I found you could drag and drop into the Finder’s “file picker”. How long has Safari been doing this? This is coolness on the level of the Sonic Screwdriver! I just tried it with Gmail and it works just like Campfire (have to click a link to display the button, then drop on said button).