Curious: what application do you use to get the red markup on the images? Then how do you get the marked up image up to the KM Forum?
I use SnagIT, and it works great for screen capture and image adjustments and annotations. One license allows use of both Mac and Windows versions, and on multiple computers.
If you use Chrome browser, it is very easy: just copy image to clipboard and paste into KM forum post.
If you use Safari, you will have to first save the image to file, and then upload the file using this forum editor button: 
Unfortunately SnagIt is very expensive (US$50) and the trial does not even work without requiring you to sign in with an account.
I use Skitch for my markups. It is free from the Evernote folks (apparently the Mac App Store version offers in-app purchases to Evernote Premium).
It does not have the nice speech bubbles of SnagIt, but it does everything I generally need.
I’m not sure I would call it “very expensive”, but it not cheap either. It does many things that Skitch does not do, including video, capture an entire web page by scrolling, user defined shapes, and other effects. Of course, if you don’t need these features, then it might not be a good value for you.
Are you sure? I was able to download it without an account. I think the account is only required if you want to publish to their screencast.com site.
Skitch is free, but it’s not clear how much longer Evernote will continue to support it as a standalone app. Many of it’s key features have already been incorporated into the Evernote app, and Evernote (the company) has been discontinuing apps that are not part of the core Evernote product.
I suppose it depends on what you need and how often you will use it.
Yes, I should be more clear - very expensive if all you want is to markup an image.
You can download it, but it asks for an account on launch and does not appear to have any way to progress without one. Perhaps I am wrong, but that was certainly the impression I got when I tried it recently - I launched it, and then could get no further without an account.
For my purposes, all I wanted was to markup images. I figured I would give it a go though, since, as you say, $50 is not overly expensive, but I could not determine what features it might have because I didn’t get to try it out as I wasn’t going to create an account just for that.
Well (aside from what Tom and Peter suggested) I just used the built in markup utility in Preview in OS X. It’s solid & works well but doesn’t have as many features as SnagIt/Skitch I’m sure, and all I did to upload them was save them as a new image and then upload the new image.
Peter, and everyone, the best way to get a quick understanding of what SnagIT can do, is to watch this short video:
###Snagit 3 Overview Video (2m41s)
If this video interests you, there are follow-on videos and articles providing more details.
It is unfortunate, but most app developers have moved to requiring an account (free) just to download or activate a trial version. I have a “dummy” email account I use just for this purpose when I don’t want to give my main email account.
Full Disclosure: I have no association with SnagIT (TechSmith) other than having owned and used SnagIT for well over 10 years, both on the Mac and on Windows.
One thing I found out was that Apple’s Preview has some very interesting functions.
I was listening on TWIT the other day and one guy was commenting of all of the amazing things Preview actually has to offer.
One in particular is that if you choose the drawing tool and make kind of a retangle manually around an area, it actually creates a real “formal” rectangle shape with sides that can be readjusted for size. Also if you make a line and do a sharp bend at the end (kind of like making a checkmark, it will turn that line into an arrow.
I use Evernote Premium as well, that does very good markup in my view, but the ease of adding these shapes and lines and arrows without having to change the tool I am finding is pretty useful.
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[quote="radiator, post:11, topic:3100"] if you choose the drawing tool and make kind of a retangle manually around an area, it actually creates a real "formal" rectangle shape […] Also if you make a line and do a sharp bend at the end […] it will turn that line into an arrow.
[/quote]
Many thanks for this hint. I had completely missed this shape recognition feature. (It works also for circles and triangles.)
Thanks to your hint I played around a bit more and discovered another great thing: I can create real call-outs in Preview, simply by selecting a fill color for a drawn arrow:
- Draw an arrow or a line.
- While the arrow is selected set a color fill.
- A small rectangular call-out text field will appear at the beginning of the arrow. It has a sliding connection to the arrow.
- Type your text into the call-out field.
- The text will automatically get the color from the set stroke color. But you can change the text color separately in the text tool popup.
Heck, how could I have missed this all the time!?
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Ha! Yes, that was the whole point the guy was making on TWIT. I think they were so enamored Preview, they wrote an ebook about it. So many things it does that people don’t know about.
I tried your recommendation - very cool. It even works when simply using the pen tool and creating a lined arrow that way, and then selecting the background.
The only thing I have not had it able to do is to autoscale the background if you want to write in a margin, that is, auto-canvas resizing.
Yes. I’m not even able to manually add canvas. However what I can do to create a free canvas area (“margin”) is this:
- Open the image, select all (⌘A), then ⌘X
- Paste it in again with ⌘V
- Now I have the same image as before, with the difference that I can displace the image on the canvas.
- Grab the image and displace it to the left.
Now I have a free canvas margin on the right-hand side where I can place my stuff. Of course the free space I “gained” on the right-hand side is cut from the image on the left-hand side. So, this makes only sense if the original crop was generous enough.
If you don’t want to lose a part of the image, you can do this:
- [same as above]
- Tools > Adjust Size…, uncheck Scale Proportionally, enter a new width of 120% or so, paste the image with ⌘V
- [same as above]
Not very elegant solutions… 
Yes, I see what you mean. Probably for a lot of the applications I use this
for, it would work. Hmmm… Ok, well let me know if you find other useful
hidden features. It is nice to just be able to use the native application
as it is tied into other workflows, etc.
Just accidentally noticed in Preview, trying to make the array, you can draw a line and then circle around something to get a line pointing at a circle.
The fill color is a partial opaque brown.
This seems to be the shape recognition for the “speech bubble” shape. (You can drag the inner green handle to open up the line.)
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