On OS X, Twitter.app’s image hosting services all have a nasty habit of shrinking the image to save bandwidth. Unfortunately, reducing the resolution really ruins screenshots — often, all of the text is lost, which can defeat the point of including it in a tweet.
At first, I turned to CloudApp. Their Mac app, which I highly recommend, has a system-wide hotkey to upload any file. Once it’s done uploading, CloudApp puts a link to the file on the clipboard. It’s a really great system, but it has one flaw for this use: the URLs it generates don’t end in an image extension (e.g. .jpg), so most twitter clients don’t recognize it as an image. Because of that, anyone that reads the tweets has to open their web browser to see the image.
To prevent that, I’ve been using imgur as a host, because they’re fast and free. Plus, they have a massive 1 MB cap on image size. That’s great, but compared to CloudApp, it’s still pretty slow: I have to go to the webpage, select the image, wait for it to upload, copy the URL, and then finally return to Twitter.app. What I really wanted is a CloudApp-like experience for Imgur on my Mac.
So I made one. It’s both a command-line utility and an OS X Service, for easy uploading from both the terminal and the Finder.
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