We sing the praises of plasq's fantastic private beta Skitch tool for making it dead simple to capture, edit and share screenshots with a good variety of online communities, but Mac OS X's own Preview app for viewing images and PDFs isn't without at least a couple of these basic tools. These definitely are not on par with Skitch's capabilities, but as you can see, Preview offers text and oval circling annotation tools, and that Select Tool can help you crop an image (or even multiple pages of a PDF). As far as getting your work out of Preview and off to wherever it's going, the best you can do is save a new copy of the image and manually move or upload it, but hey: if you don't need all the features Skitch has to offer at it's yet-to-be-set commercial price, Preview just might do the job for you.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-29-2007 @ 4:50PM
Galley said...
Yeah, I was suprised recently when I discovered that Preview could crop photos.
Reply
5-29-2007 @ 5:05PM
JSN said...
Will all you guys quit talking about Skitch!
I've been on the beta list since it MacWorld and I check it a couple of times a week.(In fact, I hopefully checked their site when I read this thinking the beta was available now!)
Plasq is doing the same thing Omni did... talking big and then taking forever to let us have it. And the not-so-special people (like me) have to read about how great it is and how the special people get to have it now, blah, blah, blah... this is very frustrating. They should take it off their front page since we can't have it anyways!
Reply
5-29-2007 @ 5:12PM
am said...
the thing that preview really needs is a "resize" option for photos. it kills me that it doesn't have it (as far as i can tell). does anyone know how to resize a photo in Preview without apple script?
Reply
5-29-2007 @ 5:16PM
Billy K said...
I could replace 50% of my Photoshopping with Preview if only it allowed image downsizing (not just compression).
(I only bring this up because I know The Apple brass reads all comments on TUAW and enacts our every wish.)
Reply
5-29-2007 @ 7:16PM
Ahmad said...
you can't add annotations to images, only PDFs
Reply
5-29-2007 @ 7:46PM
Mr Lizard said...
@ 5: Quite right. A work-around would therefore be to save the JPEG as a PDF, then add the text
Reply
5-29-2007 @ 9:56PM
Able-X said...
You could just use imagetricks or imagewell for resizing, both are free, which is ALOT cheaper than Photoshop :)
Reply
5-30-2007 @ 10:09AM
Jonathan Brodsky said...
@4 you can use the command line utility called sips that comes with every mac for that kind of image scaling. I was able to avoid photoshop for a very long time using sips and preview together.
Reply
5-31-2007 @ 12:03AM
Dave Chartier said...
I too will toss in a vote for ImageWell. Great free utility (with some options via a paid upgrade) for basic scaling and cropping.
Reply
6-01-2007 @ 2:55AM
Cris Pearson - plasq said...
@JSN and everyone else -
Very sorry about that. We showed Skitch at Macworld which was pretty close to being finished, but the web service, myskitch.com was early stages. Getting a EULA and TOS for a web service wasn't the fastest either.
This certainly wasn't a marketing ploy. We did seed early versions to a small(ish) amount to bloggers (including TUAW) and known good testers because they are doing the stuff Skitch does everyday and we needed some early feedback.
It was never intended to take this long though and I can totally see how it would get annoying.
We have stumbled getting a service we would feel safe releasing to thousands of users.
Big lesson learnt on my behalf - get all aspects rolling earlier in development.
Reply