Screen shots made easy with Aviary

Mashable pointed to this usefull tool yesterday. Aviary is an "in-the-cloud" image manipulation utility (trying to take on Photoshop and others). To lure more users to their site, they have created a neat screen shot capture tool (bookmark this URL).

I use screen shots a lot, and until now relied on CTRL-PRT SCR, followed by a paste into a PowerPoint slide. (For example to extract tag clouds from Wordle) Two drawbacks:

• A huge, very wide image (I have a large screen resolutions) gets plopped into your slide that you need to crop by switching the PowerPoint zoom to 33%
• A partial web page image (PRT SCR only captures what's on the screen)

The Aviary tool is more useful:

• Simple: type in aviary.com followed by the URL you want to capture, for example aviary.com/http://ww.axiom.co.il if you want to make a screen shot of my corporate site www.axiom.co.il.
• The image (covering the entire web page including parts that are not on the screen) opens up in a basic image editor for cropping.
• You can save the image for future use