TinyGrab – Uploading Without Effort
Raise your hand if you’ve ever been in a chat with a friend, and no matter what you do they don’t just get what you’re telling them about their computer, or vice versa. Put it down if you wouldn’t be able to solve that with a screenshot. The problem with that is getting the screenshot across the chat connection.
TinyGrab is a simple application with a web service attached that cuts out all the work. When you take a screenshot, TinyGrab uploads it to grab.by and copies the link to the clipboard. Unlike some other uploading sites, it doesn’t copy the link to a page with the image and some other content, such as ads. The link is to an image file, so you can (for example) embed it in a webpage or any chat that supports pictures.
The basic service is free, and simply allows uploading of screenshots. However, it is limited to ten images per day. A premium account is £10 (about $16 at the time of this writing), but instead of a periodic fee, you pay one time for the life of the service. The most notable advantage to going premium, although there are several, is that URLs are 11 characters long, rather than three times that. (Presumably these will get longer as more images are uploaded to TinyGrab.)
The TinyGrab client for Mac watches your Desktop for files named like screenshots. Snow Leopard users (and those few power users who have changed hidden settings as to the location and name of their shots) need not worry — TinyGrab is aware of both situations. When it finds a screenshot, it uploads it in the background to grab.by, changing the menubar icon to yellow while it’s working, green when it’s finished, and red if any error occurs. When it’s finished, it sends a Growl notification, plays a sound, and copies the URL to your clipboard.
A nice feature is the ability to tell TinyGrab to move all uploaded images to a folder (mine go to ~/Pictures/Screenshots). It renames the files with their TinyGrab ID, which is the part after “grab.by/” for premium users and “grab.by/grab/” for free accounts. It would be nice to disable this renaming and have TinyGrab number them sequentially, as Leopard will do if you don’t move screenshots off the desktop, or leave Snow Leopard’s more sensible naming convention intact.
TinyGrab's menu shows your last five uploads.
You can easily hide the Dock icon, and have TinyGrab live in your menubar. From the menubar icon you can see your last five grabs (you can choose whether clicking on them will open or copy the URL in the preferences). You can upload any image (assuming TinyGrab supports it) from the menubar as well, and you can pause uploading if you want to take screenshots for your personal use. What you can’t do is hide the menubar icon, even if you have the dock icon showing. It would be nice to have this completely in the background, with possibly a keyboard shortcut to pause uploading and upload your own images. Possibly a shortcut to show preferences as well, although it could show them when TinyGrab is launched while already running, as similar apps do.
All this (besides short URLs) is available for free, with a limit of ten grabs a day. Your £10 buys you a lot more functionality on the web service. You can get long, random, “encrypted” URLs for images you want to stay private. (It appears that the only form of encryption is the same randomization of a URL that free users’ images are put through to make them longer, so don’t count on too much security.) You can organize images, changing their names and adding comments, and delete them, from the online control panel. You can view a list of your grabs and search through them, although if you just use the Mac app it’s of little use — every grab is named “mac_screenshot.”
In premium users’ online settings, as well as changing your name and time zone, and whether short URLs are enabled by default, you can specify an FTP server for the uploads. However, I was unable to get it to work, so I can’t verify if it goes just to your server or to TinyGrab’s as well.
For the casual user uploading throwaway images, I recommend TinyGrab’s free version. The premium version, while nice, offers nothing most people would use, and that includes the ability to upload more than ten images a day. It’s a great tool to have even if you only launch it when you want to upload something, and more convenient than any other offer I’ve seen. For the review, I was given a temporary premium license, but I don’t intend to upgrade when it runs out. However, for power users, the one lifetime payment seems like an exceptionally good deal, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.
