Paste to web : sharing screenshots made easy

December 13, 2010

Here’s a little utility we’ve been using internally for a while. We’ve decided to make it available to the public as an early christmas gift to Mac users. Introducing PasteToWeb : a very handy Mac OS dashboard widget that lets you upload screenshots on the web. It’s extremely easy to use, and efficient. Here’s how to use it :

• Press “Ctrl-Shift-Cmd-4” on your Mac, and select the area you’d like to share
• Go to the dashboard (by pressing F4 unless you’ve changed the setting)
• Click the “PasteToWeb” upload button

That’s it, you’re done : the widget is uploading the image for you. Once the upload is finished, it will copy the image’s URL in your clipboard, ready for you to share.

Here’s why it’s so great :

• It is super efficient. You can litteraly upload a screenshot in under a second.
• Not another daemon : it only runs when you need it. No CPU or memory consumption if you don’t use it.
• Never write anything to the disk at all : the bitmap data goes straight from your clipboard to the web.

Now here are some interesting things to know about PasteToWeb :

• Ctrl-Shift-Cmd-4 is a standard OS X gesture to take a screenshot to the clipboard. PasteToWeb just uploads your clipboard, so any other way to put bitmap data in your clipboard will work just as well.
• The images are sent to imgur.com