Hi All

I recently found this very useful tool called Jing which you can use to grab images and video easily and then publish them on to a blog or networking site or simply save to your PC etc.

The main reason I reference to it is that I often need to grab images for training material development plus I think there is some useful web 2.0 functionality that could help in developing some of the more informal learning environments.

The Jing applications is FREE from http://www.jingproject.com/ which is always good. Its easy to download and install with no problems.

It sits on your desktop as an always ready application although you can of course exit it if you don’t need or want it running in background.

There is like a little bulb sat at the top of the screen which you move your mouse over to select Jing options. The available options extend out which you can then click to select as appropriate. The main two being Capture and History.

 

Select your own image area

 Capture then enables you to highlight a given area of the screen you want to capture. The amount of area you want to select is very flexible and easy to do. It will automatically select zones on your screen and application but you can easily select your own specific area as per my examples

 

 

 

 

Jing history viewer

History is as it would seem. You can see all the images and video you have previously captured, allowing you see them all in one place regardless of where you have saved them. From here you can easily annotate and manage your files.

 

Back with the Capture option, once you are done with setting the capture area you can decide if you want to capture an image or video.

 

 

 

Easy annotation provided

The image option grabs the frame area you have selected and then gives you the opportunity to highlight and annotate the image you have captured before providing a number of options relating to what you might like to then do with the image such as embed within Flickr or save to disc.

The only image save option I can find is png which is a bit limiting but its easy enough to open in Office picture manager or similar and format as say a Jpeg.

 

The video option is pretty easy to use too. Like the image option, you highlight what you want to record, click video and the software starts to count you down to start recording. Once you press the stop button it the gives you options to send to a URL, ftp or save to disc. The video can only be 5 mins in length and is saved as an swf file.

I have had a reasonably good play around with it and it seems stable and gives good quality output.

If you are someone who needs to capture screen shots for training or presentations then its well worth giving a try out too.

Can you recommend and alternative? Let us know.