One of the nice things about Live Writer is the fact that you can very easily create plugins for it.

The plugin writes out the file and then delay deletes the file if you have the Don't save image file option set to reduce file clutter on the local drive. Live Writer actually makes a copy of each image you embed into a post so there's no need to hang on to captured images. You can also opt to not save the image locally. The idea is that you typically have a standard set of capture settings and these are restored each time you capture. Settings are not saved, unless you click the Save Settings link, which stores the settings for later reuse. You can optionally pop up the image editor and edit the image the same way as you can with native SnagIt use. Clicking Capture then goes off and uses SnagIt's native image capture functionailty (you know the red box to capture whatever capture mode selection you've made) to capture the image to file.

When you click the Insert SnagIt button this dialog pops up which exposes most of the SnagIt capture options. Here's what the plugin looks like inside of Windows Live Writer:

Combined with Live Writer's ability to send images directly to the Web site via HTTP image capturing and publishing has never been easier. For example, I have SnagIt plugged into my Help Builder tool to provide for screen captures in the Help HTML content.īlogging is kind of similar: image capturing is pretty vital and making the process directly integrated into Live Writer itself makes screen captures a real cinch. I've long been a huge fan of SnagIt from Techsmith and since SnagIt's capture functionality is available as a COM interface it's quite easy to expose the functionality in other applications. I spent a few hours a couple of days ago creating a plugin for Windows Live Writer that allows for easy screen captures.

Snagit key registry