Capture and annotate screenshots to illustrate your posts

One of the main reasons we moved to the Discourse engine to power our community discussion area was the superb image processing features. When discussing software it’s so much easier if you can copy + paste screenshots into your posts and replies. This is a quick “How to” on grabbing, annotating and dropping screenshots to furnish your posts.

Capture

I’ve always worked on various Windows based machines, more due to necessity than choice, but I digress. Since Windows 7 we’ve had Windows Snipping Tool. This is native to Windows and allows you to capture the whole screen or just an area of the page, you can then draw over the top, highlight and copy the annotated image to the clipboard.

It’s pretty basic but in most cases it does the job! For me it’s permanently pinned in the task bar.

For Mac users you have Shutterbug there’s a great walk-through here on how it can be used.

There’s also a whole host of screen grabber apps you can install with varying degrees of functionality.

Paste

Once you’ve captured your screenshot you can copy it to the clipboard and then simply drop it into your post using Ctrl + V, or by right clicking and selecting “paste”.

That’s it…go crazy! It saves us a huge amount of time when we know exactly what part of the system you’re referring to so don’t hold back.

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