Snap, Save, Sort, And Share Images On Your Mac

Ever since someone told me to capture chunks of screen real estate with the keyboard (control+shift+command+4) I’ve been a screen shot snapaholic.

I’ll find a piece of a web page, snap it, send it to someone. I’ll grab a piece of a document, snap it, send it to someone. I’ve even been known to save and organize my snapshots, thanks to the Sent folder in Apple’s Mail.

No more. I now possess a solution worthy of the Graphic Gods who watch over Mac users, and fill our needs, even when we don’t know they need to be filled.

The problem here is, well, pieces of information. We collect bookmarks in our Safari browser, but utilities exist that let us share those bookmarks with other browsers.

There’s Yojimbo and Together and Lord knows what else to help us collect, sift, organize, and forget all the pieces of information that we find valuable, or, at least so valuable we don’t want the agony of throwing them away.

That’s why we have big hard drives. So nothing gets thrown away by accident or on purpose.

Graphics, images, photos, they all begin collecting dust on our Macs like we’re running some kind of electrical, digital closet—we just keep stuffing things inside.

One of the last bastions of disorganization had to be the image snippets (remember—control+shift+command+4) that we snap, save (someplace), share (sometimes), send (making the Sent folder in Mail my defacto saving device).

Little Snapper has quickly become one of those handy little Mac utilities that stays open all the time (like Mail, Safari, iCal, iChat), always ready to capture, organize, edit, and share.

Wait. Do that again, Alex, but slowly. Capture? What could be easier than control+shift+command+4 (which delivers cute little cross hairs so you can select the screen area you want to save)?

Little Snapper has a Menu Bar item with multiple options; so simply you don’t even need to remember the keystroke combination. Click, select, select, saved. It’s that easy.

The menu lets you snap a whole screen in a single click,  a part of a screen in a click and a drag, a single window (say, of an open document or utility), or, and this is where the fun begins, a whole web page from Safari.

Wait. Doesn’t Safari already do that? Yes. The web page Archive function is handy. Go to a page in Safari. Click Save. Save the archive page file… someplace on your Mac. See the problem?

Little Snapper does that, too, and finds a place to save it instantly. That was Capture. What about Organize? Little Snapper does that, too, in the now familiar iPhoto, iTunes, iEverything left column with folders named the way you want.

Capture whatever and store it in Little Snapper’s library tools, which makes the place where you end up when you drag and drop an image.

I know what you’re thinking. “Alright, Alexis, what about Editing and Sharing?” Good questions, Grasshopper. The other half of Little Snapper is dedicated to editing your graphics with vector-based annotation tools, and sharing.

First, Edit. Little Snapper is something of a vector editing tool, too, where you can take any image you’ve saved and mark it up—from graffiti to boxes and shapes to lines and arrows to highlighting to text.

Oh, and all the markups? They’re totally non-destructive—akin to a layer on top of the image so you can mark up like crazy, come to your senses, erase the phrases that would get you fired, or delete the whole sordid mess. Or not.

Sharing is just as easy but adds a few new words to the average Mac users vocabulary. What I do with most of my graphic snippets and screen saves is share them, which is why Mail’s Sent folder became my organizing tool.

You can export your graphic screen save or snippet as a PDF file, perfect for archiving and emailing. But wait, Virginia. There’s more than one way to share this holiday season. Upload images to your Flickr account. Or, FTP (file transfer protocol) the files to a different server.

LIttle Snapper also knows you may want edit the graphic snippet or web page in something like, oh, I dunno—Adobe Photoshop. Do so with a single click.

The folks who make Little Snapper are the same Mac folks who create and publish RapidWeaver, the robust and deceptively simple web page creator tool that makes Apple’s iWeb look sorely in need of moderninity, or a facelift, or, at least sensible shoes.

They’ve created QuickSnapper, which is an image sharing service for Little Snapper users. When you buy Little Snapper you also buy a piece of (and hereditary access to) QuickSnapper, a searchable web site that lets you share (and be shared; not that there’s anything wrong with that) graphics with others.

In other words, Little Snapper fills a void not wholly filled by any other Mac utility since this and that.