Question for you all - what do you use to incorporate screen captures into your blog entries?
For a variety of reason, I like to incorporate images into my posts. Sometimes it is just the logo of the company/product/service that I am discussing[1]. Sometimes it is a part of a web page or program screen (here's an example). In any event, my highly unsophisticated process of getting those graphics right now on my Windows XP PC is to do the following:
- Press Ctrl+Alt+PrntScrn to copy the current open window to the Clipboard.
- Switch to Windows Paint and paste the image into the window.
- Click on one of the other tools (like the eraser) so that I de-select the entire area and then click on the selection box again.
- Select the region I want to copy and then do the standard copy to Clipboard.
- Switch to Windows Live Writer (my current blogging editor of choice) and paste the graphic into my blog entry.
Like I said... not very sophisticated, but it works well. However, I'd like to simplify it a bit - ideally drop it down to simply my steps #4 and #5, i.e. select a region of the screen and then paste it into WLW.
Unfortunately, there doesn't yet seem to be a WLW plugin that does what I want, although this plugin seems quite close if I feel like dropping $39 for TechSmith's SnagIt program (and perhaps I will). It sounds like Vista has a built-in utility for doing this, but I don't have Vista and don't foresee getting it for some time.
What do you all use? How do you bring in screen captures? logos? etc.? [2]
Thanks in advance.
[1] And sometimes a logo can be brought in by simply right-clicking it in Firefox, choosing "Copy Image" and pasting it into my blog editor. But sometimes the colors don't work and sometimes a site doesn't make a logo easy to get this way - the logo is part of a much larger image or embedded in Flash... so you need to capture that part of the screen to get the logo.
[2] And Mac users, please don't bother telling me that this is: a) trivial and built-in on the Mac; or b) I should get a Mac and run Parallels to use Windows and again would be able to do it. I get it, okay... I understand the belief that Macs are superior for graphics. But that doesn't help change the fact that my corporate laptop is a Windows XP box!
