While checking my email this morning, I saw today’s newsletter from Carsonified. They have really been cranking out some good content as of late and today is no exception. The post is is titled Saving Inspiration with ImageSpark, but it brought up a broader topic I would like to discuss with you. What tools do you use to catalog your inspiration? Below are some tools I have used in the past.
- File Folders: This may be the easiest and most obvious tool. It’s also the most self explanatory, so I won’t go into brain numbing detail. Caveman -> Caveman Save Image on Computer -> Caveman put image in folder -> Caveman beat chest in joy.
- Flickr: Patrick Haney was the one who brought this to my attention in a post titled, “Archiving Inspiration“. There is a nice group of inspirational images in the Flickr Set associated with the article.
- Evernote: If you haven’t heard of Evernote, you should seriously consider wasting more time on the web. It’s an amazing tool and they have an app for the PC, Mac and iPhone. Once you create your account, you can access it from any of those sources and all of your images are accessible and stay synced, wherever you go. Presently, this is the tool that I use for cataloging. It works great and they have a free version. You can also share your notebooks with the world, as I have done with my inspiration notebook. Evernote also has a slick FireFox extension called Evernote Web Clipper.
- ImageSpark: I didn’t know about this one until today, so I don’t really know much about it.
- LittleSnapper: I also hadn’t heard of this one until today, but so far it looks amazing. When combined with EmberApp or Flickr it seems to be a very useful tool for catalog and sharing images.
Tools for Grabbing Images
- Browser (FireFox, of course)
- Delicio.us: this works well when you’re just tagging a URL (my inspiration set on delicious)
- OS X
- Capture Screen Segment (Cmd + Shift + 4): saves PNG image to the desktop
- Capture Entire Window (Cmd + Shift + 4, space bar): saves PNG image to the desktop
- Paparazzi!: will capture an entire web page (scrolling and all).
- LittleSnapper: new to me. I haven’t used it, but maybe you have. It must be good. It’s from the UK and they spell organize with an “s” (organise).
- PC
- Print screen, duh! This method is lacking for the PC in comparison with the Mac. That’s where the next tool in my list steps in.
- SnagIt: This is one of the best tools I’ve used for screen capturing, period, but it’s a little bloated and pricey just for capturing images. They do have a trial version you can try out before you decide to break the piggy bank.
I put this post out, not to convince you to use one of the tools listed, but to spark a conversation about how you catalog your inspiration. Please post a comment below and let me know what tools and processes you use.
#1 by Jeremy Flint on August 26th, 2009
On my Mac, I use Skitch (http://skitch.com) to capture most of my images. It has support for webposting to Flickr for sharing or a private url at Skitch for selective sharing. You can also annotate images you capture.
For capturing entire site designs, I use a Firefox add-on called Screengrab (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146), that will capture an entire site (scrolling included) and save the image as a jpg or png. Hopefully Skitch will offer this feature in a future release.
I keep most of my inspirational design stuff in a Flickr set – http://www.flickr.com/photos/jflint/sets/72157603425408204/ – although i need to add a bunch of images to it. I usually do those in a batch after they have collected for a month or so.
#2 by Carol Logan Newbill on August 26th, 2009
I have Screengrab for Firefox also. Before I used it, though, and before Safari was available on the PC, I often would get a full screen cap by using Browsrcamp. This is a free service that shows you what your site looks like in Safari on a Mac.
Another Firefox add-on that’s useful for archiving is Scrapbook. It enables you to save complete web pages and organize the saved pages similar to the way bookmarks work. I have folders set up within Scrapbook for various topics and save pages into those. (Caveman discover fire! Beat chest and howl!)
The third tool I use, which probably takes the place of Evernotes for Brit, is Jarte (think WordPad on steroids – very fast to load, not many fancy features but not absolutely plain text either). I am very, very skittish about cloud apps like Evernote and Flickr and would prefer to keep everything on my own hard drive or backed up on my server. Jarte supports multiple tabbed documents, so I keep it open with docs marked “just notes,” “things to do,” “things to do TODAY,” “marketing,” or whatever the task du jour might be.
Then of course, there is the enormous volume of paper file folders in the drawer, but we really won’t go there.
#3 by Brit on August 26th, 2009
Carol, just for the record, Evernote keeps a local copy of all of your notes in each flavor (Mac, PC, iPhone) of the app. You can “synchronize” from any app to update the cloud so your changes will reflect on the website and other app flavors.
#4 by Carol Logan Newbill on August 26th, 2009
Thanks, Brit – will check it out.
#5 by Herve Billiet on August 27th, 2009
To capture my screen on a PC I have a small free tool called FSCapture. I use that a lot ! I think they began selling it now, but you can still find a free version I guess. Really handy tool.
http://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm
Another tool you better don’t forget is to backup your computer. Visa and othes have build in software to do that, others can use http://allwaysync.com/ to get important data on a external hard drive – freeware too I think