How many times have you wanted to share a screenshot with somebody… so you created your screenshot using one tool, then uploaded to some image hosting site, and then 5 minutes later you finally have the link to send to them. What if there was a way to do all of that in 5 mouse clicks in just a few seconds?

Our problem is solved by a free service called Jing that is designed to be extremely easy to use… and it's free, at least for now. Not only that, but they give you free (but limited) account at Screencast.com, where you can share your images and videos, and access them online. If you prefer, you could also use FTP for your own server, or upload the images to Flickr instead.

Using Jing

You can start a capture from the desktop widget, the tray icon, or a shortcut key… just draw a box around the selection, then click either Image or Video.

If you clicked on Image, now you can simply click the Send to Screencast (URL) button…

And now the URL to the screenshot is on the clipboard:

http://screencast.com/t/L7pwzjWa

If you were keeping track… that's only 5 clicks and you've got a link on the clipboard that you can now paste into a conversation or email.

The Embed button will give you embed code instead of just the URL:

Or you could even Copy the image itself to the clipboard, or Save to a file:

You can switch from using Screencast.com to either Flickr, FTP, or a File.

The image capture has additional tools, like arrows, text, and markers:

You can also take a look at all the screenshots and videos you've taken with the History tool:

The video capture is equally impressive, although with the fairly limited screencast.com account I can't include a great sample or else I'll quickly run out of bandwidth, considering the number of subscribers and all.

Customizing Jing

The first thing I did after installing Jing was figure out how to turn off the irritating desktop widget:

Open up the preferences (which is oddly named "More"), and you can uncheck the box for "Show Launcher" to immediately remove it.

You can also choose to send your pictures to Flickr:

or FTP… after you add in your server information, you can customize the Share link, putting [filename] where you want the auto-generated filename to go. That's the link that will be copied to the clipboard.

You could customize the image embed code if you wanted to use this tool to upload images to your blog. Just put in something like this:

<img src="[filename]" />

This way you can choose either the URL or the Embed code when uploading screenshots, saving you some time.

Accessing Your Images Online

If you choose to use the Screencast.com account, you can login with the same details you used when setting up Jing, and see all of the items from anywhere:

According to the Jing FAQ page, you'll get 200mb of storage space and 1GB of transfer with your account for free (for the time being), and you can upgrade that further if you'd like.

Of course you don't have to use Screencast.com, you could use your own server (FTP), or Flickr.

Download Jing from jingproject.com