Where do you want to paste shots?

Firefox Screenshots
#1

There’s a lot of ways to put things onto the clipboard, and what’s most useful has a lot to do with where you will paste your shot. To give you a sense, here are some options:

  • The shot URL (what we expose now)
  • The image itself. This works well for documents, and also works in Twitter and GitHub
  • The image with title and link. This works well for documents, but doesn’t work in some contexts where only an image is allowed (like Twitter and GitHub).
  • At least in some cases we can provide a text fallback when you paste into someplace (like here) where strictly text is allowed. Some options here:
    • The link by itself
    • Title: shot-URL
    • shot-URL (Title)
    • Title: shot-URL (source: source-URL)

A separate question is how to expose multiple copy/paste options without making things really confusing, but to start I’d like to know what would be useful.

#2

I don’t think I’ve ever used anything except the direct image URL unless it was a mistake. Back when browsers didn’t auto-resize images to fit the window there was some benefit to having it on an HTML page that could, but now all I want is the image.

I guess mainly just for speed so it doesn’t have to render anything else.

#3

What do you do with the URL once you have it?

#4

Either paste it in a chat program or website, or wget it if I need it locally. Most of the time I’m screenshotting bugs, so I’d want to either paste it into IRC or github. Both can auto-render a direct image URL, but not a landing page.

#5

It bums me out that Facebook and Twitter are still the only sites that do decent previews, and that on so many sites the state of the art is to run regexes on URLs.

Though I wonder if we could listen to the Accept header here. I.e., make this work: <img src="https://pageshot.net/239d9s/somesite.com"> (and if we could, we could change the URLs to end with .png)

#6

I tested this idea out but it didn’t work, Accept headers don’t give enough information. Ah well, would have been cool.

#7

Direct image url is what I’m looking for. I use pageshot to show ui features in emails or slacks going out to other team members. Copying the image into the clipboard then pasting it in doesn’t always work for these cases.

#8

If you click on the image after making a shot, you will be taken to the direct image url. You can also right click and choose “Copy link location” to copy the direct image url without leaving the shot page.

#9

Ah, perfect! I was trying to use the url from the “Share” button to embed the image in a new email (gmail). Gmail didn’t recognize it as an image. Doing the “copy image/link location” method works just fine.

There should be a button at the top for “Copy Image URL”, right next to “Share”. That would make the usage of this feature more explicit.

#10

I need to paste shots in a regular forum.

They must be in a recognisable image format (gif, png, etc.). The forum software doesn’t accept URLs as images. I did eventually figure out how to get a .png link, but it wasn’t easy. The “copy/paste” thing that popped up automatically only gave a URL.