xargol's weblog

Uploading screenshots to the internet to show to other people on IRC etc. has always annoyed me. First, you’d have to press the PrntScrn key, then you’d have to open Paint, paste it, save it as a PNG file somewhere on your harddrive and then finally upload it to ImageShack or some other image hosting service.

To make things a bit easier, I wrote a small utility in C#/.NET which does most of the work for you. The program resides in the notification area, and doesn’t bother you at all when you don’t use it. When you want to take and upload a screenshot, you simply press Ctrl + PrntScrn. The utility, which I’ve given the incredibly daft name “Screengrabber”, then automatically takes the screenshot and uploads it to a pre-set URL. At that URL you would have the backend running, which is written in PHP and uses MySQL to store the screenshots.

After the screenshot has been uploaded you’ll hear a notification sound, and the URL to the screenshot is then copied to the clipboard. Then you simply paste the URL in the chat window or whereever you want it.

Example of a screenshot taken and uploaded with Screengrabber. Also notice that the backend automatically has generated this resized version of the screenshot.

If you only want a screenshot of the current application, you simply press Ctrl + Alt + PrntScrn instead. If you’ve tried this with the built-in Windows screenshot function on a partly transparent window, you’ve probably noticed that the stuff in the background of the window also appears on the screenshot:

Screengrabber, however, automatically fills the transparent parts with a solid color, so that the background doesn’t “leak” through:

Source code and binaries are available for download.

Requirements:

• C#/.NET client - .NET framework version 2.0
• PHP/MySQL backend - A web server with PHP and MySQL