In Earl Mardle’s blog I found a little gem of usability today. He pointed to Cropper, a tool to easily create screenshots with, and to a plug-in to automatically upload those screenshots to your Flickr account. This sure beats my current routine, which is capturing complete screenshots, cropping them using IrfanView, and then uploading them through my blog software.

Once you’ve installed Cropper (for win also available as .msi), simply drag the files for the plugin to the plugin folder. Now in the menu of the Cropper icon in your system tray it should give you Flickr as an output option. Select it. Drag the Cropper icon onto your screen. This should open a ‘form’ that lets you select parts of your screen.
In the picture above you see the selection tool

When you’ve made your selection, double click the ‘form’. You now get to annotate, title and tag all of the screenshots before uploading them to Flickr. You need to select a Flickr set to upload to by the way, so create one in advance, or use an existing one for your screenshots.

Upon first uploading a picture it will ask you to authorize Cropper with Flickr. I am not sure why Cropper asks for both read, write and delete privileges. I’d say ‘write’ would be enough.

The Print Screen button still works too, for entire screen shots. Alt + PrtSc for the active window, and Ctrl Alt PrtSc for the section of your screen where your mouse is.

Good stuff! I think Earl just pointed me to a real timesaver.