Capture and Upload Screenshots in an instant with Gyazo

I just got hold of a really useful (multi-platform) tool called Gyazo. It is a single-minded app that will upload an image of whatever you select up to their website to allow easy sharing to twitter, facebook or whatever.

I’ve used Jing before and also heard of ZScreen and SPGrab but Gyazo wins becasuse it is so light and easy to use.

Why is it so good?

Not a resource hog

Gyazo’s executable is 243kb. The app doesn’t run in the background and when it’s launched it takes up under 1mb of memory (increasing to about 3mb during the image upload).

It’s fast too

Gyazo cuts out the middle stage of editing an image and goes straight from marquee selection, to your image being on the web in about 10 seconds. I’m only sharing screenshots for Twitter/Facebook purposes so I’m not concerned about any editing. I have other tools when I want to capture and polish a screenshot.

No junk

When the image is uploaded, you don’t get hit with a page full of ads or other distracting bloat. After the picture is sent to Gyazo’s servers your default browser opens displaying the hosted screenshot as a PNG file (the best file type for screenshots)

Tips

Shorten it

The url that your image gets is something like http://gyazo.com/1586a12ff40e832692e4e60da86b1966.png
That’s a bit long for Twitter, so employ a URL shortening service to shrink it down. My default browser is Google Chrome and I have the bit.ly extension in my toolbar to instantly shorten and share my uploads. They make a really good combination.

Launch it

Gyazo can be launched from a desktop icon or be pinned to your taskbar. However, as it doesn’t show an icon when running (all you get is a crosshair cursor) it seems a waste of real estate. I’ve set a Windows shortcut key so the app is launched whenever I hit CTRL+ALT+G. To do this…

• Open the Start Menu and find the Gyazo app. (Shortcut keys only work if applied within the Start Menu hierarchy)
• Right-click the shortcut and choose properties
• On the Shortcut tab click the Shortcut Key text box
• Press your chosen key combination and it will appear in the box
• Click OK to save (this requires admin privileges)

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There is a paid-for Pro version of the software if you want to keep an automatic history of images but the free version is all I need.

You can ask questions directly via twitter @gyazo

I hope the tool is of some use to all of you out there. Let me know if you disagree, or have found something better, in the comments.