Skitch

You may have noticed that my posts that contain images are made with the help of Skitch.

Skitch is both a web-side and client-side image hosting/editing program currently available only on Macs.

The App

Skitch is generally focussed around the capturing, manipulation and editing of screenshots. When installed on a Mac, Skitch adds a menu bar item which looks like a small heart with a small drop-down arrow next to it. When the heart is directly clicked, this brings Skitch to the front and allows editing of the image currently opened in Skitch.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

When the drop-down menu is selected, the user has the option to:

* Take a full screen snapshot

* Take a cross-hair snapshot

* Take a snaphot with your Mac's built-in iSight camera.

* Show or quit Skitch.

The crosshair facility allows the user to snap an area of the screen for editing in Skitch. Skitch itself has a number of basic editing tools which, in all honesty, are more for highlighting things rather than advanced Photoshopping.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Skitch facilitates drawing on pictures with a variety of shapes (circles, rectangles, lines, arrows etc.), adding text to the image and re-sizing and cropping the image according to your preference.

Once the image has been edited, you have the option to save it to our HDD (using a drag and drop action) or to upload it to the Skitch.com website.

The Site

Each Skitch user has his/her own personal Skitch storage site. For example, my site is skitch.com/adamtalbot. When you have finished editing the image, you click the button labelled 'Web Post' and the image is instantly uploadd to your Skitch.com space. Click the 'Share' button to go to the where the image is stored and have the one-click option to copy the direct URL, embedded URL, forum URL etc. of the image (the embdedded URL is the code required to integrate it in to your Blogger post).

I am not sure what the limit for storage is on the Skitch.com space, there is no indicator to speak of - I would expect something in the region of a GB or so but this is a just a guesstimate.

Verdict

To be honest, I didn't think I'd have much use for Skitch, screenshot sharing didn't really seem to be something I used often but I have found it becoming invaluable in capturing information. This blog post shows a 'why didn't I think of that?' way of integrating Skitch with Evernote, another service I'm a key user of. With Evernote's image-recognition software, all my Skitch screenshots that contain text become searchable and available on my Mac, iPod Touch and WAP-enables phone.

Give Skitch a try or check out some more info. from the screencast below...