UseShots Editor is a tool that helps bloggers use screen shots in their posts. It takes care of all the tedious stuff. You just take series of screen shots (as you would do with your digital photo camera), annotate them, and press Publish.

• No third party programs required.
• No need to resize screen shots to make them fit you blog’s layout (it will be done automatically).
• All file stuff is behind the scenes.

Version 0.4.1 introduces new features that improve the quality of screen shots and make UseShots-generated posts more search engine friendly.

You can download it here.

• SEO-friendly image file names
• PNG support
• More proportional screen shot scaling
• More prominent screen shot size and scaling information

I have finally found time to replace those ugly file names (e.g. 1C4D4616E76602684EA67F3BFB314C209401D40B.jpg) with much more readable and and SEO-friendly ones. Captions of the corresponding screens are used to generate the names of the screen shot files.

For example, if the caption of the screen is “WordPress 2.5 post editor“, the file name of the corresponding screenshot will be wordpress-post-editor.jpg (or .png, or .gif, the extention depends on the format of the image file).

If you don’t specify the screen caption, or the caption contains non-English characters, the image file will be named pictureN.jpg where N is some number.

UseShots Editor automatically saves screen shots in a web-optimized format (best image quality + smallest file size). In version 0.4.1, the PNG format has been added to already supported GIF and JPEG. This means that screen shots created with version 0.4.1 will occupy slightly less web server space than those created with previous versions of UseShots Editor.

You can also load images in PNG format into UseShots Editor.

At the upper left corner of the image area you will see the screen shot size and scaling information for the current image.
The format is width x height (scale%)

The scaling percentage is the size difference between the original screen area and your screen shot.

Why not give UseShots Editor a try? It’s free, tyny, and really useful (at least for me. Most posts in this blog have been created using UseShots Editor.)

What do you think about UseShots Editor? Do you miss any feature? Any comments and suggestions are welcome.