Taking Screenshots

Whether you just want to show something to someone, or especially when you're submitting a support ticket to us, it can be helpful to be able to capture an image of exactly what's on your screen.

A great way to do this is Jing. Jing is a free piece of software, available for Windows and Mac, that lets you take still images or video captures of your screen, or a portion of your screen, and upload them to the web. It then provides you with a handy link to the newly uploaded image/video that you can give to someone so they can see it.

To use Jing:

1. Download Jing from http://jingproject.com/ and install it.

Once Jing is finished installing, you will be presented with a tutorial window that will walk you through your first capture. Once you have completed this (or if you don't want to go through the tutorial), click the Sign Up Now button at the bottom to create your Screencast account.

2. Create a ScreenCast account.

ScreenCast is a service tied to Jing that allows you to host the images and videos you create with jing, and share them with others. With a free membership to ScreenCast, you get 2GB of space for uploads. Images and video are very well-compressed, with most videos less than 5MB, so it would take some time and effort to fill up your allotted space.

In the window that pops up after you click Sign Up Now, enter an e-mail address, a desired username, and a password. If you want to send Jing some usage data, keep the "I want to help make Jing better" box checked. No personal information is collected; a full list of what is sent can be found in the "More details" link next to it. Keeping it checked or unchecked won't affect Jing's performance at all.

You're all set to use Jing now! You'll see the half-sun icon at the top of your screen. When you hover over it, you'll see three icons. The far left one that looks like a cross-hair is used for capturing (more on that in a moment). The center icon that looks like two Polaroids contains a history of screen captures from this computer. The final, two-gears icons is Jing settings.

3. Set up a capture Hotkey. (Optional)

If you want, you can set up a keyboard shortcut for capturing. Open up Jing's settings, and open Preferences (the center button). Within that window, click the box where it says "Click here", and when it turns gray and says "Press desired key(s)", press the key or key combination that you want to use to capture. Be sure to make it something that isn't already bound to another function. For example, the "e" key or "Ctrl + C" are bad choices. F9 is a good choice. Now, you can just hit that key to capture, instead of going to the Jing icon, and clicking the crosshair.