blog.SiteXero.net

I’m someone who likes to show screenshots a lot – whether it’s the full-screen, a single application, or just a small crop. It was always very tedious to hit printscreen (or alt+printscreen, to only capture the window that’s in focus), paste this in an image editor (I prefer JASC Paint Shop Pro 7, it’s lightweight and more features than I need), crop it first if needed, save it, then go to an image hosting site such as ImageShack or TinyPic and upload it, then retrieve the URL to the newly hosted image.

So I decided, with my knowledge of Visual Basic .NET (even if it’s not very extensive, mind you), to create a small program to handle almost all of the work for me. I won’t go through the program’s entire life-cycle in this post, as it’s at least more than a year old by now, but it’s in C# now. I’ll mention now that all images are uploaded to ImageShack. I used to use PicOodle but they had changed their site (for the worse?) so you have to log in to upload images.

Its current feature-set includes the following options:

• Upload by dragging and dropping an image file from your computer onto the main form window – self-explanatory
• Uploading from clipboard – this is for when you use printscreen or copied the image from your browser or an image editor
• Uploading from computer – this will give you the normal file browse dialog so you can manually select an image from your computer to upload
• Uploading a screen selection – this takes a screenshot and then lets you draw on it and then lets you crop an area to upload easily
• Uploading from the file right-click context menu – gives you an upload option when you right click an image file on your computer

When a file is finished uploading, it automatically copies the image’s URL to your clipboard so you’re ready to go and paste it right away. There’s also an option to copy the last URL to your clipboard again in case you recently put something else in your clipboard.

Imaer window

The main window may seem rather bulky after awhile and it does always stay on top of your other windows but don’t worry, you can simply close the window as it actually sits in your system tray. You never need the window open unless of course you want to use the drag&drop functionality. You can access all the options by right-clicking the system tray icon. And yes it remembers if you left the window open or closed for when you reload the program later on.

There are no other forms (windows) except for a slightly-transparent progress bar that’s displayed in the middle of your screen during the upload process and of course the window where a screenshot of your full-screen is displayed for you to draw on/crop when using the upload screen selection option.

This program is far from done either. I’m never completely satisfied, and this has a lot of room for improvement. It sometimes fails to fully upload the image, and will say an unknown error occurred. I’m not quite sure what causes this but I believe it has to do with ImageShack’s API page. Aside from that, it should have no errors. What it could use improvements on though are its upload screen selection feature as well as the ability to choose from more than one image hosting website and possibly a better history feature (instead of an option to retrieve only the last URL provided). Since it’s built in C#, it requires you to have the .NET Framework (at least version 2.0, I didn’t want to make it completely dependent on a higher version if I didn’t have to) which means this is really only a Windows program. I hope to one day recreate this program in a higher-level programming language – or in Python, since I was trying to learn it – so I can support other operating systems

Here is the download link: imaer.zip

And if you for some reason don’t have the .NET Framework (choose one of the links; if you don’t know which, it’s most likely the first): .NET Framework 2.0 Redistributable Package (x86) or .NET Framework 2.0 Redistributable Package (x64)

If I ever update Imaer, I will make another post about it, so be sure to check in! I don’t have the program itself set up to monitor for new versions, since I rarely ever do have a new version. That would have gave a bunch of pointless pings to my site.

Tags: programming