Software Recommendation: HotShots

by Jakub in Recommendations 21.04.2015

Good tool for making screenshots is priceless in IT. It helps with making proper customer documentation, helps with support, is must-have when creating your products portfolio and so on. It should allow to make annotations, upload to web instantly and give you link to share or put into documentation.Windows users have the awesome tool from Techsmith, Jing, although Linux it's not so easy to find similar tool for linux.

One can use either paid tools like Gyazo, which is quite cool but free version doesn't allow to annotate and gives us commercials, which we don't like. We also don't like Ruby. There is Shutter, but it lacks some basic features, that we would like to have when working with clients or on documentation.We were using imgur-screenshot script for a while, but it forced us to use some graphical software like Pinta or GIMP to make annotations, not really fast.

And this is when the winner came: HotShots is an awesome screenshot tools with awesome features.

• It supports FTP, FreeImageHosting, imgur, imageshack and CanardPC.
• It includes great editor for making annotations
• It allows you to customize how the format of link copied to clipboard.
• Has 5 screenshots modes, "freehand" among them
• It also supports proxy, different keybindings and more!
  

We especially loved two facts:

• It doesn't use buggy scrot, like gyazo or imgur-screenshoter, so there is no need to manually remove these ugly black lines that sometimes happen.You can also manipulate the exact region you need, so no more bad screenshots.
• It supports FTP and custom links, so we can upload images internally to VPN FTP eg ftp://10.8.0.100/shot-111.png and we will get public link, eg http://i.keios.eu/shot-111.png in our clipboard

Only thing that makes Jing still the best option for Windows in our opinion, is the fact that you can record short movies with it, whereas HotShots is screenshot-only, but Linux combination of HotShots and Eidete, which has no time limit and creates nice webm movies is a definite winner here.