Skitch

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.