ScrnShots Officially Launches

If you take a lot of screenshots – whether for use in blogging or just because you’re inspired by the design of something you saw on the web - then you may be interested in the service from ScrnShots, which I dubbed a sort of “flickr for screenshots,” back when it was still in private beta earlier this year. With ScrnShots, you can upload, tag, and share your screenshots with the other members of the online community and those images can also be embedded on your web site or blog as either a thumbnail, a medium-sized, or a full screen image.

Today, the ScrnShots team has released three major updates to the service which aim to make using ScrnShots much more useful and practical. The first of these updates, and the one I’ve been waiting for myself, is the ScrnShots desktop software. Available for both Mac and PC, ScrnShots Desktop runs in your menu bar (Mac) or taskbar (PC), staying out of the way until you need to take a quick screenshot. When you’re ready, a quick click will let you take a shot of whatever is on the screen and upload it back to the ScrnShots service. I found the software to be easy enough to use for taking a shot of a certain portion of the screen, but because the tool forces you to drag the cursor to outline the section you want to upload, it was more difficult to grab an easy screenshot of the entire screen – especially on a laptop using the touchpad. For that, Jing is still the better choice. The images I took also seemed to come out a bit muted, so I don’t see how I could switch from Jing at this point, especially since that tool lets you upload pictures straight to flickr.

As promised, the ScrnShots software can be used to upload your existing photos to the service, but, unfortunately, it only offered the ability to upload one file at a time – really no better than what the web site offers itself. This was sort of a letdown for me, as it looks like offloading my entire collection of screenshots to the service will have to wait.

The other two updates released today include a new public API for developers (someone build me a multi-file upload tool?) and a built-in search feature, which will help you find images that others have uploaded to ScrnShots.

With so much concern these days over who owns an image and what rights you have to use it, a service like ScrnShots could fulfill a need to get quick and easy access to images you can use in a blog post. Since most of my screenshots involve taking a picture of a logo or a web service, I don’t see any reason why someone shouldn’t use those images if they wanted to, and I’m sure others will feel the same.

Since the service also provides an online repository for images, casual flickr users who don’t have a Pro account could use ScrnShots in lieu of flickr for storing images that would otherwise fill up their flickr account and count towards their monthly upload limit. Having another place to upload those images could certainly be helpful.

However, the ScrnShots desktop tool still needs a bit of work before I could give up Jing and make a complete switch. I’m definitely still keeping my eye on ScrnShots, though, since having a site just for my 1 GB of screenshots would be a great thing…if I can ever get them up there.