Do you ever find yourself pasting screenshots into your Confluence pages? At Atlassian, we’re often creating screenshots for describing bugs we want fixed and features we want implemented. So let me share with you a nifty little tip to make the process smooth and easy.

Here’s what you’ll need

1. Confluence 3.1 or later – Confluence 3.1 introduced the awesome attachment Drag and Drop feature which lets you drag images and Office documents directly into the rich text editor. (Note that drag and drop currently supports Google Gears so you’ll need a browser that supports Gears.)
2. A copy of Skitch installed on your computer Skitch is a free application for Mac (sorry Windows) that lets you quickly take screenshots and either upload them to the web or drag them onto your desktop.

How to do it

Once you’ve got these set up, you’re good to go. Here are the simple steps to take for quickly adding screenshots to your Confluence page:

Step 1

Go to where you want to take the screenshot. In this case I’m going to take a screenshot from the fourwalls site.

Step 2

Take your screenshot using Skitch.

Step 3

Annotate your screenshot so people know where in the image they should be looking. Skitch makes this really easy.

Step 4

Drag your screenshot from Skitch by gabbing the tab at the bottom of the Skitch window and drop it directly into the Confluence editor.

Step 5

Drop the screenshot into the Confluence rich text editor. The image will get automatically attached and embedded into the page.

Once you save the page, you’ll see a beautiful, annotated screenshot in your Confluence page.

Tell us what you think

Do you use screenshots in Confluence? Have you used Skitch? Do you have another favourite screen capture tool? We’d love to hear what you think.