Bloggers need to do quick and easy image capture and basic image editing. We’re busy people and don’t want to have to learn something onerous or spend a long time on image work. After all, you have the next piece to post.

This doesn’t apply just to blogging, what you need to have is the ability to capture and do little resizing and cropping - as fast as possible. That’ll do, right? I’ve been blogging now for years, for the last two on my PowerBook, these are the best tools for the job on OS X:

All of these are free, and nobody mention PDF or OS X screen capture keys, they are just not good enough.

First off lets get into Paparazzi! I forgot to blog about this app way back when, I had a devil of a time trying to find it again. Though I suspect I put it in my Top 100 OS X Apps list - I should have just looked in that.

This universal binary freeware app takes a screen grab of an entire webpage regardless of the length of the page. Here’s a tiny grab of the CR frontpage, you can save these at any size:

The original shot is 4098 pixels long, I dropped this to 200 for illustration purposes.

Team this with the image manipulation tool Imagewell, it crops and resizes perfectly, great for speedy image editing for blogging. Imagewell is also a universal binary.

For screen grabs turn to a Dashboard Widget, yes sometimes they can be useful, a great mini app called Screenshot Plus. It can grab a screen, window, area or another widget and save to a number of different formats.

These three tools will enable you to efficiently manage any basic image workflow, not only for blog work.

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