Getting rid of Skitch with Jing and Dropbox

To make a long story short, Evernote acquired Skitch, removed all the useful functionality and shut down the old hosting site. Way to go Evernote! You used to be able to take a screenshot, annotate it (blur things out, add comments, arrows pointing to things), upload it to the Skitch website, and have the app automatically copy the image URL directly to your clipboard. This does not work any longer, even with an old copy of the application due to Evernote shutting down the Skitch website.  Because of this, I can no longer use or recommend using Skitch for everyday screenshots that require annotations.

This post will help you move to a different app (Jing), with similar annotation and auto-copy functionality (auto-copy of the direct image URL - sample), and do it for free. Note: if you don't mind that Jing's default hosting service (screencast.com) is limited to 2GB of storage and that it copies the webpage URL (sample) only (you cannot configure Jing to copy the image link directly using the default screencast.com hosting), then you can skip the Dropbox integration steps and simply download Jing.

1. First off, login to your Skitch account, go to Dashboard and Download Tool. You can request downloads of all of your Skitch uploads. You can later download these and add them to your Dropbox folder or upload them to Jing if you are going to use the default screencast.com hosting.
2. Download and install Jing from TechSmitch. If you plan on using the screencast.com hosting instead of Dropbox and wish to upload all your old Skitch image files you can also download the screencast.com upload tool.

If you have the same requirement as I to have the auto-copied URL be that of the direct image and not some website hosting the image (as screencast.com does), then you can proceed with the next few steps. If you don't mind using the screencast.com website, then you can skip the rest of this.  

1. Create a directory in your Dropbox Public folder called Jing (~/Dropbox/Public/Jing).  
2. Copy any file (maybe your old Skitch images you downloaded?) to this new Dropbox location, right click on the file, in Dropbox Menu select "Copy Public Link". 
3. Paste this link in a text editor. It should look something like this: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/666666/Jing/tempfile.txt. Copy this link but exclude the temp file name (tempfile.txt in this case). You'll use this later on.
4. Open Jing, More -> Preferences -> Customize Jing Buttons
5. New -> Scroll to Right and click on Save.
6. Change the name to Dropbox.
7. Change the location to ~/Dropbox/Public/Jing
8. Change clipboard contents to "Custom Code" and paste the link from step #3 above in both sections and add [filename] to the end of it. For example: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/666666/Jing/[filename]
9. You can now take screenshots, annotate them (like Skitch), save them to a web location, and auto-copy the image URL only (not the webpage url to the image like the default Screencast website does)
10. An optional step here is to drag all the downloaded Skitch images into this folder so that you can reference them at some other time. 

That should do it.  One cavet with Dropbox that I have found is that is that the filename Jing uses to name your files is based off of the current date/hour/minute.  Since there's no second on this name - derp, you can only take one screenshot and save it to Dropbox per minute, otherwise your previous screenshot may get overwritten.  This would also open your screenshots up to a filename guessing attack assuming someone wanted to traverse all the dates/times to download your screenshots.  You can always add some additional text to your file name before you save it if either of these issues concern you.  Issues aside, it's still better than using Skitch to screenshot + annotate then another app to upload the picture to the cloud.