Maybe you use Flickr, Picasa or even SkyDrive to share your images with your family and friends, but when you want to share screenshots, it's a bit of a hassle to have to open up MS Paint to save it, open your browser and upload it online.

You're already sharing pictures online so wouldn't it be easier if you could just paste the screenshot somewhere online and just share the URL? Let's look at how you can do that and even share an edited version of your image the easy way.

You can certainly download often-loved Jing (or another screen capture utility), but if you're not a full-time blogger and thus don't need another program clogging up your registry, you can certainly make use of these workarounds to share screenshots.

Taking & Pasting Your Screenshot

    1. Make sure you have the latest version of Java which is version 6 update 20 as of today. You can quickly verify that at the Java site.
    2. Now press on the Print Screen button on your keyboard to capture a full-desktop screenshot, or if you just want to capture your currently active window, hit ALT and then Print Screen.
    3. On your browser, head to Upload Screenshot and accept to load the Java applet.
    4. Press on 'Paste' or hit Ctrl + V to paste your screenshot. You can also drag and drop or browse for your previously-saved screenshot.
share screenshots
    1. You'll see a progress bar that indicates that your screenshot is being uploaded and in a few seconds, you'll be redirected to a seriously sweet page with your uploaded image, a shortened URL for instant sharing and tweeting, HTML and forum codes to embed thumbnail and large versions of your screenshot (or just select the embed code for the full-size image.)
share screenshots

You can click on the image or the View Full Size button above the screenshot to see your original screenshot in .JPEG format. Since you can tweet your screenshot, you'll be able to check statistics so you'll know how many times your screenshot has been viewed (hit the Statistics button above the uploaded screenshot.)

share screenshots

Considering the site is free to use, offers a Firefox extension to grab screenshots of any website, requires no registration, and has no ads, I'm totally sold.

Quickly Editing Your Screenshot

Maybe you don't just want to share your raw screenshot. Maybe you want to add a caption on it, circle the juicy part or even crop it. The excellent Falcon tool by Aviary has a variety of features to facilitate quickly editing your image. Aviary also has a more advanced image editor with filters if you want to use that instead (or any other capable image editor).

    • After you click on your uploaded screenshot, you can copy the URL of the hosted image on UploadScreenshot.com in JPEG format.
    • Go directly to the Falcon app and paste that URL.
screenshot snapshot
    • Hit Get Started and edit away: Crop, resize, add arrows or text, etc.
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    • Now just click on the share this creation button at the top left.
screenshot snapshot
    • Copy any of the codes for sharing your annotated screenshot: Webpage for comments, direct image URL, HTML and forum embed codes, and even the link to open your image in Falcon so your friends can edit it.

You can also save the image to your desktop or create an account on Aviary so you can claim your image in the Aviary Creations gallery. If you plan on annotating images often, you might want to check out Aviary's webpage capturing Firefox extension that imports automatically into Falcon.

Sharing By Email, Blog, Or Twitter

With either the raw or edited screenshot's direct URL, you can share your image by email and in Twitter, and use the embed codes for your blog. This is nothing new but for anyone who doesn't know, in Gmail, you can display the image in your email body without having to add attachments by clicking on Insert Image, selecting Web Address (URL) and pasting the image URL.

taking screenshots

Here, I've taken the URL of the thumbnail version from a screenshot hosted in UploadScreenshot (just copy the HTML code, paste it in Gmail and delete the non-URL bits).

taking screenshots

If you use Windows Live Hotmail, switch to HTML view when you compose a new email so you can paste the HTML embed code. If you switch back to Rich Text mode, you'll see the screenshot in the body email.

taking screenshots

To Share Screenshots Of Websites

This method of instant screengrab publishing allows you to share screenshots from your programs and desktop activity, but if you're interested in capturing webpages, there are bookmarklets, screencapture-and-share programs, Chrome extension or websites.

If you've used these tools, tell us about your experiences! If not, what methods do you use to share your screenshots instantly?

Image credit: John Sexton