Jing's UI can be a bit confusing -- in the default "sun globe" setup, you need to hover your mouse over the sun, then click the 'gears' icon (in menubar mode, just click "More"), then click "Preferences" (also looks like a gear). Next select "Customize Jing Buttons." A small window appears. Click "Save" -- no, that doesn't save your changes, it just lets you create a new 'Save'-type button to save screenshots to your local drive.

Here we're going to change this Save button to our Dropbox button. Give it a descriptive name (like "Dropbox") and navigate to the destination folder you created as the save location. For "Clipboard Contents" select "Custom Code."

Two fields appear: Custom Image Code and Custom Video Code. You'll enter the same snippet in each, which is:

"http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/$USERID/$FOLDER/[filename]"

There are two variables in this string that you must replace. First, $USERID is a number associated with all of your Dropbox account's public files. To find yours, navigate to a file in your public folder via a browser -- the easiest way to do that is to right-click one of the files and choose "Copy Public Link." For example, a file named Top Secret.txt is in there by default.


If you paste the resutls of that copy somewhere, you'll see a URL that looks much like the one above, only with your number in place of $USERID. For example:

https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/YOUR_NUMBER/Top%20Secret.txt

Put that number into the string as the UserID. The other change is to replace the folder variable with the name of the destination folder you created in Dropbox. In our case, "screenshots." Leave [filename] as is. Then click the Save button and close up the Customize Jing Buttons mini-window.


You can make things even easier by using a hotkey for Jing (it defaults to cmd-shift-1, but you can change it). Now, all you've got to do is hit your hotkey, take your screenshot and hit the Dropbox button you made. The image is uploaded and the resulting URL is waiting for you in your clipboard! Paste away into IM, email, whatever you like.

Note that the paid version of Jing ($14.95US/year) eliminates the extra step of acknowledging the Save dialog when you take a screenshot among other things. You can even annotate your images with text before uploading.

Have fun! We're loving this here at TUAW, even if it's not quite as seamless as GrabUp was.