CheatAd !

Screenshot, image uploading, watermarking, all these are what bloggers use from time to time. It can take lots of time, or it can also be a quick and easy affair, depends on what tools you use. Here are some tools that I use frequently, and they have helped me save a lot of time and increase my productivity.

Check them out and share with us if there is any tool that you use frequently that you think will be useful for other blogger and webmasters.

Free Image Tools & Resources For Bloggers

Mozilla Firefox with Screengrab !

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146/
Tutorial articles are among the most interesting blog contents. You’d however certainly need some screenshot for that. If it involve some Internet browsing, it can be quite frustrating, to grab the whole screen and then crop the relevant part. Or even worse, if it’s more than one-screen long, you’ll need to grab it page by page, then use some image editing tools to stick them back together. Screengrab plugin for Firefox make it easy to screengrab webpages. You can choose whether you want to copy the image to clipboard or save it as a file. Choices of either whole page, visible-screen or selection-only makes it easy to use whatever you need it for.

Imgur

http://imgur.com/
There was times when imagebucket or flickr are the order of the Internet. Even now, those are still considered the poster boys in online image hosting. However, imagebucket, flickr, or facebook, twitpic, etc are really not the easiest nor simpler to use. Imgur has clean interface, simple upload, no intrusive advertisement, no registration required, and so far there is no bandwidth requirements.

Hyperdesktop

http://imgur.com/tools/
Imgur is god-send image hosting in the Internet. However, it’s not complete yet without a screengrab tool that integrates flawlessly. And that, is the role played by Hyperdesktop screengrab. With this tool, the whole works required for grabbing the screen of your computer and immediately upload it to the imagehosting has been tremendously simplified to either a CTRL+SHIFT+3 (for whole screen) or CTRL+SHIFT+4 (for selected area).

Easy Thumbnails

http://www.fookes.com/ezthumbs/
Have you encountered times when you need to upload gigabytes of images from your digital camera to Facebook/Flickr? With increasing megapixels from digital cameras nowadays, so are the file sizes of the resulting images. It’s common to see pictures with few megabytes of size, which is pretty small to fit a lot in memory cards or harddisks but can be a strain when you are attempting to upload to the Internet.
Easy Thumbnails helps to shrink size of your pictures in bulk. You just need to specify the folder where the picture resides, and will produce a copy at smaller size. You can even choose the size of the resulting images.

PicMarkr

http://picmarkr.com/
When you upload an image to the web, you can be almost certain that it will be copied by someone else. The more interesting it is, the higher the risk that someone will download the image and and decide use it on their website/blog. PicMarkr allows you to add watermark to your images, with just a few simple steps. It is useful when you need to protect your copyrights or if you want to add comments to your photos.

MS Paint

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_(software)
Yes, that is one of the most basic software used nowadays, aside from the trusty Notepad. It lacks lots of features available in the more powerful image editing software. But if all you need is to crop, resize or flip some pictures, why bother to buy or learn the sophisticated image software.