I just found a decent solution to something I’ve wanted for a while: the ability to place an image in a Github issue’s description or comment. Here’s the final result.
The actual issue, live on Github.
I’ve got it down to one extra click and keypress:
- Take a screenshot using Skitch.
- Share it.
- Paste the URL from the clipboard.
The trick is Skitch’s flexible “Share” configuration options
I created a free Skitch account and configured sharing to automatically put a “Fullsize image link” on the Mac’s clipboard after the sharing is complete:
It looks like this will work with any of the supported account types. E.g., Webdev and SFTP are both possible and are what I’ll move to eventually so that I have all my images on my own server. But right now, Skitch’s free hosting is fine for me.
Here are some screenshots of the rest of the process, once the sharing is set up. First, immediately after clicking “Share”, there’s a loading progress indicator. Apparently, you have to wait for this to finish.
Then, when done, a superflous Share dialog popup appears, but you can ignore it because we’ve configured Skitch to automatically copy the link to the clipboard:
Finally, just move over to your Github issue and press ⌘V to paste the auto-copied URL:
And that’s it. Pretty sweet.
PS: Some links I found while looking for a solution
- François Marier solves this by hosting the attachments in a gist.
- A few Stack Overflow users discuss setting up a special repo for attachments.
- Github Wikis seem to have a facility for hosting images.
- Freshlog has announced an intention to make an app to do this.
Thanks so much for the tip! This is really very handy as screenshots are almost a must for most of our error reporting.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case any for SFTP accounts, unless I’m dense. I just set this up because it’s important to me to keep the images on my own server, and I’ve got to hit the copy button to get the URL. I don’t see the option in SFTP prefs to automatically copy the URL to the clipboard.
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Now that Evernote has taken over Skitch, the image URLs have gotten ridiculously long — some of my Github pages inconsistently show broken images. I can’t tell if it’s Github filtering long URLs, or if it’s Evernote preventing (hindering?) image hotlinking, or if it’s just my bad internet connection… the end result is that Skitch doesn’t seem to be the solution that it used to be.
Evernote pretty much killed this in their recent updates to Skitch, leaving me looking for a new solution. Since I found this one here and had much good use of it, I thought I should contribute:
Of all the cloud hosting services (and I seem to have test accounts on all of them), droplr.com answered my prayers. Their screenshot feature automagically loads the screenshot page url into the Mac clipboard. But like most others (Dropbox, Evernote, Cloudapp, et al), the url points to a droplr page with a lot of other stuff about the image file.
In that situation, you then typically need to copy the image location url (right click on image and choose Copy Image Address), then use this url in github. Too many extra steps for me, and if you do that in droplr, the url you get actually expires 1 minute later anyway.
But a query to droplr help turned up the awesome feature that makes them part of the ideal copy/capture/paste solution. Simply add a + to the end of the url droplr adds to your clipboard, and voila – a non-expiring link to **just the image itself**, no surrounding page “chrome.”
So to complete the magic, I set up a Quickey to type the  (the droplr permalink + and the github markdown closing parenthesis).
The result: One keystroke to activate droplr screen capture, draw the rectangle for the capture, wait a moment for the droplr menu icon to “blip” confirming that the image is uploaded, and then hit my Quickey that works just like pasting in the whole markdown. (I use Shift-Opt-4 to capture to droplr, vs. the Shift-Cmd-4 used to capture to system clipboard; and Shift-Opt-V to “paste” my full markdown string in, so the keystrokes are easy-to-remember variants of standard system shortcuts.)
Note: Quickeys is not officially supported under Lion or Mountain Lion for now, though it still seems to work for me under Lion (with the occasional crash). But Keyboard Maestro, or any text expander that lets you include clipboard contents in an expanded string should work to concatenate the github image markdown with your droplr url and +. It only takes a couple of minutes to set up, and makes inserting images completely painless.
By Any Chance, do you have additional articles just like this specific
1 named, Attach images to Github issues with Skitch
| The Geek Law Blog? I desire to read even alot more concerning it.
Thanks.