Send your Window Clippings images to an FTP server

Ari Glaizel just sent me this neat add-in for Window Clippings that he created to send images to an FTP server. It is a well thought-out add-in making it immediately useful to folks that do a lot of web publishing or blogging.

The upload address indicates where the add-in will send the image and the source address is used to optionally build a URL that can then be used to reference this location via HTTP and can then be directly inserted into an HTML document or blog post.

Download sendtoftp.zip, copy the files to the directory containing WindowClippings.exe, and register the add-in on the Add-Ins tab of the Window Clippings options window. Although Ari doesn’t have a blog at the moment, I’m sure he’ll be happy to respond to any comments you leave on this blog post.

Thanks Ari!

For those folks running Vista with UAC turned off, I have added support for add-in registration for this scenario. It will be available in the 2.1 release.

© 2007 Kenny Kerr

8 Comments

  • Sounds like a great plug-in Ari! I'll wait for v2.1 before I try it though (UAC problem). Btw, regarding the modal window problem, I've sent you an e-mail with a test crash program.

  • Fantastic. Exactly what I've been looking for. Thanks Ari!

  • Feature request:

    I need to perform different actions in different situations. I.e., sometimes I want to simply save the image locally, at other times I want to save them remotely (with Ari's add-on). How about a new context sub-menu, 'Send To', which captures and invokes only one of the registered 'Send To' add-ins? This would prevent having to change the actions in the Options dialog in different situations.

  • Glenn: thanks for the feedback. I’ve already started thinking about a feature to meet this need. It would rely on a concept I’ve tentatively called “profiles” and initially introduced in a comment on this page. Essentially you’d be able to save different profiles each with their own action sequence. So for your example, you might have one to save locally, another profile to send to an ftp server, etc. The ability to have independent action sequences is more useful than simply calling an action directly as you suggested since you can then configure multiple actions per profile. For example, you may want to add a watermark to images posted to the web but not to those saved locally. You may also want to use different image formats depending on where the image was going. Anyway, let me know what you think of the “profiles” idea.
    Would you still find it useful to be able to override the action sequence and call an ad hoc add-in chosen at capture time using a “Send To” sub menu like you described?

  • Being able to create and invoke multiple action sequences would be nice, but... I (personally) would still like the ability to fire a single operation on an ad-hoc basis.

    In my mind, it's similar to an application with operations invoked from the main menu. Usually, I just want to invoke one at a time (Resize, Crop, Save, etc.). The ability to batch more than is useful at times, but not often.

    My personal use cases:
    1a. Grab screenshot
    1b. Crop
    1c. Send to clipboard

    2a. Grab screenshot
    2b. Crop
    2c. Send to local file

    3a. Grab screenshot
    3b. Crop
    3c. Send to remote server

    It just seems that having to create and then flip between profiles for each sequence would be a bit annoying.

    Certainly just my 2cents. Thanks for listening ;)

  • Glenn: thanks so much for sharing your thoughts. It’s really helpful to have folks providing me with this kind of insight. It’s so hard to know all the different ways that people use Window Clippings considering the combinatorial nature of all the features and usage scenarios it allows.

    Since the “profiles” feature is a considerable addition it will likely only be available in the 2.5 or 3.0 timeframe. I have however decided to add the “Send To” submenu as we’ve discussed to the upcoming 2.1 release as I can see the benefit of just calling a single ad hoc action and the time it would save in not having to change the Window Clippings options every time.

    Thanks for the feedback!

  • A very useful plugin. Nice work, Ari.

    Support for SFTP/SSH/SCP would be really useful since a lot of web hosts no longer allow FTP connections for security reasons. Might also be a pain to support, though. There is a command-line client as part of the PuTTY suite which could be useful for a plugin to wrap around, maybe.

  • Kenny,

    A couple of feature requests:

    1. Have an option that automatically makes the crop selection handles available after selecting a window. 99.9% of the time I crop the selected window, and would save time to not have to select 'Crop or Expand Selection'

    2. After I've cropped an area and am ready to capture, I often bring up the Options... to remember what actions are set to fire. This cancels the selection, requiring me to reselect the area. If there were a way to bring up the Options while maintaining the current state of the app, that would be helpful.

    Great stuff. Thanks again.

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