TinyGrab 2.0. Image Capture and Upload All in One

Sometimes the simplest of tasks can just be a major pain in the ass. Posting a screen shot from your desktop and posting on forum involves enough steps to warrant not bothering at times.  Normally it’s a case of

Capture Screen
Ftp Image or goto website, upload image and then grab the image link grab link

In steps TinyGrab 2.0 with a premise to make all this simple.  Using a simple keyboard combination, TinyGrab performs the capture and upload in one easy step.  All the images are accessible shared as part of a social interaction webpage where comments can be left.  So it’s not quite a Capture, Upload, Link to blog tool but a different take on sharing screen captures.

TinyGrab resides in the menu bar waiting for either a combination press or a manual choice of capturing a screen area and after creating your account, putting in details to the app, you are ready to start screen capturing.  With the screen capture you are limited to use defined areas so you can’t grab a complete window by clicking on it unlike the built in Grab application on IOS.

Once you’ve captured part of the desktop you get the chance to name your snapshot, add a description and upload to your TinyGrab account.  You can upload to your own FTP server as well as the default TinyGrab servers.

It’s as simple as that, hitting save brings a nice upload bar underneath the TinyGrab icon showing you the upload status which blends in with the desktop feeling.

Accessing your grabs
Once uploaded your grabs are situated in your web control panel.  There is a delay from upload to items being showing the control panel view which, I presume, is down to some pre processing for the thumbnails.  Pictures and collection management is best summed up a simplified Google Picasa experience.

Screen grabs and manual uploads are shared in a social context rather than a hotlink to the image itself.  For example http://grab.by/aDRg takes you to a view of the picture alongside the ability to enter comments as well.  Comments can only be left if you have a pro version of the software. As you can see by the url, links are shortened for a Twitter friendly length.

Those looking for simplified upload and share on blog features are going to be disappointed at this point in the review.  Sharing your photo’s to the outside word is apparent from the outset but as mentioned earlier you can upload to your own servers if you wish.

“You can use TinyGrab to host images for your blog through hotlinking. Please be aware though that TinyGrab is intended for simple screenshot sharing, not as an image host/alternative to save your site’s server bill. We ask kindly that you do not abuse this feature, if you do you may find your account and service terminated.”

Stability Issues?
The developers themselves have noted some stability issues and these are blatantly apparent unfortunately.  It “could” just be my Lion setup but never have I experienced app crashes, high cpu usage and then complete network connection take-down at times on this sort of level.  None the less it remained stable enough at times to get a feel for the program.

Overall
I had hoped this would be more aimed toward bloggers in general with the ability to hotlink to images and such. A previous favorite of  mine, Imagewell, became all bloaty and TinyGrab fills the niche area of capture and upload with ease.

If you take the bugs and performance issues at times, Tinygrab is a great tool for simple screen capturing, uploading and has great potential to come.