Skitch

The 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.

Uploaded with plasq’s 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.

Uploaded with plasq’s 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.

Sometimes you want the Skitch application window to appear in the captured Skitch image. For example, you might want to blog about Skitch and show the application window to your readers.

When you want to capture the Skitch window as a Skitch image, hold down alt, then Snap. That’s It.

If you want to enable a timed Snap, hold down shift as you click to grab the image you want to capture. You can click and drag, or single click to grab a window.

You can crop and resize from there.

tada!

Skitch is great for capturing screenshots that you can annotate, then share. You probably know that already.

You also probably know that you can use the ‘drag me’ tab to save your images to your desktop, a remote file server or to drop into an email or IM chat. There are many more ways to use ‘drag me’, more than I can cover in a single post.

“Ya, but what about that ‘webpost’ button, what can I do with that?”  - As you guessed there are a lot of things you can do with Skitch webpost. Let’s get powered up…

SETUP NEW SKITCH WEBPOST ACCOUNTS

After you signed up for your Skitch account and downloaded and installed the Skitch desktop application, you were prompted to enter your Skitch.com login details. The point of that exercise was to ensure that your Skitch desktop app could communicate with your Skitch.com account. Skitch.com offers a lot of options for sharing and team collaboration. But what if you want to upload images to web sites other than Skitch.com? You could always use the sharing URL’s on Skitch.com, but perhaps you just want to upload directly to your blog, or to Flickr…

I often see people asking questions like:
Q: How can I easily send images from Skitch directly to Flickr?
Q: How can I easily send images from Skitch directly to my FTP or SFTP site?
Q: How can I use Skitch directly with my .Mac account?
Q: How can I use WebDAV to upload my Skitched images?

The answer is always the same.
A: Add a new ‘webpost’ account to your Skitch desktop application.

UPLOAD DIRECTLY TO FLICKR

Adding a new account for any of the above scenarios is pretty straight forward. In this example I want to upload a picture that I took with my Canon G9 directly to my Flickr account.

STEP 1)
Drag your photo from iPhoto or other photo management system and drop it into the Skitch desktop app.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

STEP 2)
With the photo loaded into Skitch, click the little down arrow next to the ‘webpost’ button and click the ‘Open Webpost Settings’

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

STEP 3)
Add a new ‘webpost’ account by clicking the plus symbol.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Select ‘Flickr’ from the drop down menu and enter your Flickr account name.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

STEP 4)
With your photo loaded in Skitch, click the little drop down arrow next to the ‘webpost’ button again. This time click your new Flickr account. As soon as you click, the upload will begin.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Once the upload process is completed, Skitch will automatically open Flickr.com so you can edit the Title, description and add Tags to your photo. Edit, then click save in Flickr and you end up with a photo to show off to all your Flickr buddies.

UPLOAD DIRECTLY TO OTHER SITES USING SKITCH

If you blog you probably like to use images to spice up your posts or make a point. You may want to use images in other places as well, perhaps you want to post to a company help desk, or exchange design mockups with a group of peers on an intranet or wiki.

The good news is that setting up other ‘webpost’ accounts is simple, just follow the same steps outlined above and you can add as many as you like. Careful though, this might lead to multiple personality disorder and you do need to remember which “persona” you are using when you upload, so you can avoid uploading that silly picture of your spouse to your work server instead of your private family photo album.

If you want more examples of how people are using Skitch with Flickr, be sure to check out the Skitch group for ideas.

We are visual creatures, without a doubt. We communicated using images at least 10,000 years ago, during the Paleolithic age.

With live image commenting in Skitch.com you can be at least as good as the Paleolithic cave painters and you can watch as new image comments fade into your view, critiquing your work.

Why try it? Here’s one idea…

Track Google Rank on Keywords

When you’re assessing your Google search ranking for a specific keyword, grab a screenshot and upload it to Skitch.com

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

After you upload the image, put your mouse cursor in the Description box and enter today’s date. Then add the Google query link to the description box as well. Save the Description.

Next time you want to gage your ranking on this keyword just click the link in the description.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Add a snap of the new ranking, in the comments and you can track the rank over time, visually.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

 As other people comment on your image(s)  you will see live comments appear in your image page on Skitch.com.

Yesterday we released My Twitter and My MailDrop for Skitch.com. These two new services can be found in your Skitch.com account settings.

Once you setup My Twitter and generate your My MailDrop address, you have many new ways to share your images; be they photos from your mobile phone, photos, screenshots or drawings from Skitch.app (the Skitch desktop application) or Public images on Skitch.com.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

iPhone to Skitch.com & Twitter

Capture an image with your phone camera, email the photo to Skitch.com using your special MailDrop-for-Twitter email address.The image will be posted to Skitch.com, a “tiny url” will be generated and a message will be posted to your Twitter account so all of your followers can view the image you just captured.

Elapsed time from when you saw “it” happen, to showing everyone you know what “it” looked like … 15 seconds.

Skitch.app to Skitch.com & Twitter

If you have an image in the Skitch desktop application that you want to Twitter about, you have at least two options to achieve your goal.

Option 1: Use Webpost to upload the image to your Skitch.com account.From the webpage that now hosts this image, click the “Send to Twitter” box in the right-side column. Send your message to all your followers.

Option 2:  Use the “Mail this image” function (Command-Shift-M) in Skitch.app to send the image to your email application. Address the email to your MailDrop +Twitter address. Send the email. The image will be posted to Skitch.com and a message will be automatically sent to all of your Twitter followers.

Elapsed time … 15 seconds

Using email to send images captured using any email capable device (including mobile devices, laptops and desktop computers and online webmail) is super powerful. Combine the power of email, image creation/capture devices and micro-blogging platforms like Twitter and you can communicate & collaborate with a powerful visual voice.

Have you tried these new features yet? Let us know what you think…