Pictures Worth Thousands of Words

Pictures are powerful propaganda tools. Factual or Photoshopped, they have lasting power to remain on the minds of both the untrained novice and the well-trained observer.

Pictures can tell stories. They help us record facts.  They can also tell lies.

Either way, pictures convey information rapidly and effectively.  Therefore, visual images offer powerful tools to preserve ideas as they appear in the image.

Technology changes very rapidly. It does so to outmaneuver other technology.  In putting together some graphics, I discovered there are some new tricks to the image collecting trade, which I once was quite expert.  Now, I am clumsily relearning new tricks in an old trade. Many people cannot grasp why it might be important to save actual documents or images outside the cloud storage which makes life so easy and convenient.  I can’t argue with them. I won’t even try.

But, if you do want to know how to take screen shots of things online before someone invents a way to prevent you from even VIEWING your computer screen without subscribing to a service*, then read on and see if this doesn’t give you some tips to get you started in “archiving” freedom before it goes away completely,

I can’t promise this “How To” will help you do anything but clutter up your storage files with digital images frozen in time, saved to your hard drive until the backup power dwindles from the face of the earth.  But, I can show you how to create them and save them and upload them to a image hosting site so that you can share them here and other places on the internet without leaving your IP address or location information attached.  Because it really is important to document the things we see and share the information for debate, discussion and deliberation.

Why does location data matter?  Well, cleaning up a hard drive and recovering one’s files after a malicious troll has followed the image crumb trail to your home computer is messy.

And Ex$pen$ive.

Your location data is something you want stripped from images you share online.  Digital cameras and phones should do that automatically now, but even images in your own ” cloudspace” may contain some data you don’t want hanging out there, like fruit on the proverbial lowest branch.  People really are as mean as advertised sometimes.

Five years ago, I wrote a little piece showing TBPers how to post pictures with a “free” online hosting site.  Since then, so much has changed I will only tell you the images I am making here right now were uploaded to Postimage (link below), which has caused me no problems since I created a “real” account.

By “real” account, I mean an account with an email address I use regularly.  You can just grab an email address and make an account but sometimes that works out and sometimes they track you down.  I recommend a real account with a real contact email address.

At one time, I created several random accounts with various email addresses.  Then, my email addresses discovered one another and my photos got locked down.  What that means is the image hosting service’s “Bots” discovered my little trick, and the service combined all my different accounts into one.  They informed me I had so many pictures there now I not only exceeded the Basic “free” image hosting plan, but I blew through Deluxe, Premium and Premium Plus and they want me to purchase my very own cloud to use those pictures.*

 What follows is the simplest way I know to save a picture of a picture on your computer screen for image hosting service linkage.

Whether you want to read on and try it is up to you.

Many sites prevent direct copying of text without subscription, so I often simply grab a screenshot to help compose a summary “quote” and citation later. This works with almost all pages/sites so far.

What is a Screen Shot?

That is a screenshot of a  rightclick screenshot request made when I started drafting this on WordPress.  Tada. Or, as EC might say… Tah Dah.

If you are at a desktop and you “right click” your mouse, that little popup, far right blue highlight, should allow you to select ‘take a screenshot’  which we’ll do later.

For now, I’ve taken an “old-fashioned” screenshot, using my CTRL + Print Screen** which copies the entire screen to the graphics queue to be pasted into a graphics compatible program for saving or editing later.

I have used many graphics programs.  If I want to do something fancy, I open them. I almost never open them.

Almost exclusively, for photo cleanup, I use Paint. Simple and easy tool.

If your machine doesn’t have Paint on it, I bet it has a similar program.

You can also download a free graphics tool; there’s always the Gimp. (https://www.gimp.org/)

Step 1. Opening the Paint Program

Find and open “Paint” by typing Paint into the Type here to Search tab at the lower left of your screen.

Now, bear with me because the images below contain visuals  for all of the steps you need to save an image.  I’ve layered them here in one image.

I was going to say something snarky about how if you don’t grasp “layers” on a digital image, you might also need crayons, then I started trying to explain it to myself.  I realized how very complex the idea of multiple layers on a flat image really is to those who’ve not “worked” with graphics layers.

Below, I’ve posted arrows on the various “levels” or layers of my image as the different windows were added to the screen.  I think it makes sense.

Above is the “saved” image of the TBP Screen Shot, as I named it for the essay. The red arrows are placed on different “layers” of the screen. with the largest one on the text where I am now typing.  See how mind-boggling that can be?  Here, let me make it worse.  I’ll add an image of the whole image with the caption.

Below is a Cntl + Print Screen Image of that Paint process.

I believe that explains my conceptual frame of reference for image layers.  Now, I can merge all the layers into a single image OR, as Obama’s birth certificate taught us all, I can leave them in layers because almost no one knows the difference, therefore, there isn’t any.

At this point, you should have Paint open on screen with a blank page.

Paint is a pretty good little tool, if you’ve never used it.

Step 2. Creating a Screenshot Image for Upload

Return to your screen and press CTRL + Print Screen (usually upper right or an alternate to a F1-F12 key) on the page where you want to save an image.  Then, in the Paint program, hit Paste and then crop the screen to what you want to save or share.

(I grabbed a screenshot of TBP today, featuring the tribute to Ms. Freud.)

Save the image to your hard drive for upload to the hosting service.

2b. Alternate ScreenShot method

If you rightclick your mouse on most pages, a menu will appear as below.

Select “Take a Screenshot” and it will then appear as below.

Next, you will use your mouse or selection pad to select part of the screen to copy.

Other options are available upper right.

I chose just this segment and downloaded it, so it resides on my hard drive in “Downloads” Folder.

Now you might have a couple of images in a Pictures folder made in Paint and a couple in your Downloads folder from this exercise, if you’ve been following along with this How To Lesson.

Uploading them to an image hosting site is as easy as going to Postimage or a similar image hosting platform and selecting the image from your hard drive.

https://postimages.org/

Selecting the “direct link” highlight in blue with copy the image url to your queue for posting at TBP or other websites.

The links can also be sent via email if you are working on projects offline.

Lesson Summary

And, if I haven’t completely lost my touch, I’ve either taught you how to make a screenshot image using a simple graphics program like Paint or Gimp and save that image for upload to a hosting site or I’ve made you wish you stopped when I suggested you do so.  Either way, I’ve done what I stopped my current bodice ripper endeavor to do.

This one should make you think about it.

*Hyperbole is achieved in pictures by taking the image from a perspective slightly below eye level.  That gives the perception that the object of the photo is larger than life. It is more difficult but not impossible to achieve with words.

**Ctrl + Prnt Scrn is a Macro.  If you do not know what one is I’m not telling you.

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