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SnagIt + Screencast.com
A Winning Solution
One of the things we do most often in social marketing is share images with others…
1. A quick screenshot to demonstrate an idea or example
2. A quick tutorial screenshot that teaches something
3. An image in an email that does not need to be persistent for years
Whether you need the image on a nice hosted backdrop – or whether you need just the raw .jpg/.png itself – this is quite easy to accomplish – if you know the right tools.
Start by making the screenshot (I use SnagIt) or opening the existing image (again, I do this in SnagIt) and then click over to the “Share” tab and share it to Screencast.com. This will then put the URL of the screencast.com page in your copy-paste buffer and you can just copy paste the URL where you want to use it.
Here’s an example: http://screencast.com/t/DP9Vcd6tfua
Maybe, however, you want to embed the image into an email you’re sending out. Having the image somewhere OTHER THAN on your blogs media library, can help ensure that a traffic spike on the image may take the image offline but won’t crash your blog!
Doing this will produce you a URL similar to this: http://content.screencast.com/users/kimjcastleberry/folders/Snagit/media/4aa37d73-67d2-4289-9d47-4cae9b6e9766/06.26.2014-16.17.png
While that URL is big-bad-and-obnoxious, it’s perfect for embedding in places like emails where the URL is hidden in the code and only the image itself needs seen.
So how do I use this in my business?
Any time I need to quickly show someone something – this is exactly how I make either a sharable URL or an embeddable image URL.
Need more bandwidth and more uploads per month? Screencast.com also has a premium account available – though the free is all most people will need.
Once you realize the speed of doing things this way, it becomes really hard to do them any other way because it’s SO SLOW compared to this!
One note though is that I would not advise embedding these image URLs into your blog unless the post will only be up for a few months – because screencast.com is really not suitable for use as a long term CDN.
SnagIt and Screencast.com are both products made by Techsmith and I use them in conjunction with (also by Techsmith) Camtasia for a full featured image and video screencast solution.
If you only need to take screenshots from within Chrome, you might check out the 2-part Chrome Extension “SnagIt for Chrome” available in the Google Chrome shop.
What do you use for quickly making shareable screenshots of any view of your computer, server or website?
~ Kim ~
Simple Tech Tips For Marketing
The post Use SnagIt + Screencast.com As A Free Temporary Image Host appeared first on Just Ask Kim.
