By now you may have heard about Cropper by Brian Scott (I’ve even mentioned it before). It’s a nifty screen capture utility that I originally found linked from Scott Hanselman’s Ultimate Tools list. I’ve used it a few times, and it’s pretty cool. You can optionally choose to create thumbnails of each screen capture.
Well, Patrick Altman is a self-proclaimed Cropper fan, and he has written a nice little plugin for it. His plugin will take a standard Cropper screen capture in PNG format and upload it to TinyPic. Then it places the URL of the image into the clipboard for easy pasting into blogs, etc. You should try it! (Note: This image was added using this method.)
One important thing to note, though: Patrick’s plugin is compiled against a previous Cropper BETA. I had to use Reflector to disassemble it and recompile it. I didn’t have to change anything — just a recompile. If you don’t want to go through that hassle (or don’t know how), send me a quick note and I’ll forward you my recompiled version. I don’t want to post it here because it’s not my code to post, but until Patrick has a chance to update it, or tell me to stop, I’ll share.
I do also have a couple suggestions for Patrick (which I sent him via e-mail earlier today):
- Right now, if Cropper is configured to create a thumbnail image, that image does not get uploaded to TinyPic. That would be a nice feature.
- Because I really love my clipboard, I have found that I might use the Cropper -> TinyPic option, and then copy some other text before I paste the TinyPic URL someplace meaningful. So I have suggested that he consider some type of log file.
But don’t let those two things keep you from trying this out. I know I’ll be using it for a while.
Update: Patrick Altman has e-mailed me and said that he doesn’t use this plugin anymore, and that he has no plans to update it. He said that I should feel free to update my decompiled version and redistribute it. Well, I don’t exactly have a lot of spare time right now myself (more on this later…), but now I feel comfortable posting my updated DLL. So here it is. It works with Cropper 1.6. If anyone wants to make updates to it, knock yourself out — just let me know if you come up with something useful. 🙂
Dan Bartels
I just pinged him… Lets see if we cant build this functionality into the CS Gallery… Then the images would just be sitting there waiting for you to use (or not use them) in a blog post… (you can always just use cut and paste to put images from the gallery (or any other public web page) into your blog posts
Dan