Archive your Web life with ScrnShots

ScrnShots is a community for hosting screenshots. It's a companion to a desktop application that will grab and automatically upload in a similar fashion to Plasq's Skitch. Both sites have a social element, with commenting and tracking popular shots. The big difference is that ScrnShots is cross platform and will work on both Macs and PCs. You can also simply use it as an image host if you're using another screenshot utility like TechSmith's SnagIt, or OS X's Grab.

The service launched in private beta back in April, and has since opened up to everyone. I've been exploring it this morning and have come across quite a few gems just from its discovery pages, which like Flickr will highlight some of the more interesting shots based on community involvement either in page views or comments. If you find something you like, or would like to share one you've taken, there's a simple embed option to stick it on a blog or social-networking page. One thing to note is that these embeds are for specific sizes only, either close to full-size or a small thumbnail, like I've embedded below.

For power users, the integrated desktop applications offer the convenience of uploading without having to visit the site. You can also do things like add URLs and related tags--the latter of which is made far easier on the Mac version, as it will pull up tags you've used in the past and auto-complete them for you as you begin to type. Both sit in your system bar and can be called upon no matter what application you're using.

While regular users will bask in this simplicity, ScrnShots isn't the perfect solution for bloggers, what I consider to be ScrnShots' target audience. It's missing a way to annotate and edit your shots. Skitch and SnagIt offer this, and I find it a hugely helpful feature--especially for some of the shots I take and use for my posts on here. Also missing is a way to set up captions and credit on shots that are embedded elsewhere, meaning site owners will have to set up custom CSS and coding into the embedded item if they want to do either of those two things. Until it gets these features I wouldn't ditch SnagIt or Skitch just yet.

Related: Iterasi goes live with personal Web-archiving tool