How It Works

With iterasi, you don't just bookmark a page, you "notarize" it, which transfers an exact replica to your secured personal account for safekeeping. Not only is this useful for saving snapshots of pages through time, it's also highly practical for saving shots of transactions, receipts, order confirmations, and other things that you may need to refer back to in the future. Also useful is the browser toolbar's stickiness - it even appears in pop-up windows, where you usually don't find toolbars showing, so it's always available when you need it.

iterasi Toolbar

Through the iterasi toolbar, available for both Firefox and IE, you can choose to "notarize" or "quick notarize" any web page. By clicking on the former, you can fill in a description, add tags, and even "file" it into a folder of your choosing, an option which helps you better organize your saved pages. If you click on the "quick notarize" button instead, you can simply save the page to your account without any metadata.

Other Features

Similar to ScrnShots, another screen-grabbing service we profiled recently, saved pages can be shared with others. At iterasi, sharing can be done via email or by posting on the web via an embed code. However, it should be noted that ScrnShots provided far more sizes and options for doing embeds than iterasi currently does. 

At launch time, the service's scheduling feature, which will automate page captures on a regular basis, is not available. However, we're told that this option will be turned on sometime in the next 30-45 days.

Getting Access

To get access to this public beta right now, you need to sign up for an account from this web page. Alternately, you can also sign up for an account if you receive a shared page from a friend via email or if you click on an embedded page you see on the web.

At first glance, ScrnShots appears to be a takeoff on sites like FFFFOUND! or We Heart It (our coverage). Those sites let you "favorite" pictures from the web as inspiring, interesting, artistic, and so on. ScrnShots takes it a step further, encouraging you to take a screenshot of the image and then upload it to their service.

Once uploaded, you can tag the screenshot, add a description, and notate the URL from which it came. The screenshot is then available for others to find and use on their own site via an embed code. For example, here's a screenshot I took of a Twitter review site, microrevie.ws:

A Sample Embedded Screenshot

For that screenshot, I used the thumbnail-sized embed code, but there was also an embed code for the full-screen version as well as a medium-sized version, which is the one that displays by default when you go to view a particular screenshot's page.

Grabbing the embed code was as simple as copy-and-paste, but I initially thought that the embed code feature wasn't working yet because, when looking at the embed code on the page, it showed only a truncated portion of the embed code's URL. (See below). However, after copying-and-pasting, through some sort of technological magic, the entire embed code appeared.

The Embed Codes

There is also a blog widget available from ScrnShots which allows you to paste a widgetized version of a screenshot or screenshots onto your own site or social network profile. The widget comes in small or medium size and can be configured to display anywhere from one to ten of your most recent screenshots. Feeds for each user's recent screenshots and favorite screenshots are available as well.

The ScrnShots web site is well-designed and easy to use. However, the one thing it lacks is some sort of upload tool. As it is right now, screenshots have to be uploaded one-by-one, a tedious process that simply takes to long for anyone to become a heavy user of the service. That could be by design though, since they are still in private beta and may not be ready for massive uploads of photos just yet.

When it comes to their business model, ScrnShots is taking a page from flickr's book.  At launch the site will be free with unlimited uploads, and, on June 6th, the PRO service will begin. With a PRO account, you can continue to upload unlimited screenshots and mark them as private, where they can only be shared with specific people you designate. Basic account owners can continue to use the service for free, but will have a monthly cap on uploads.

ScrnShots vs Flickr

ScrnShots will certainly appeal to the design community, who may want to use it to share images with each other, but it seems odd to focus on just that niche when there is an untapped potential to become the main site where bloggers can share and store screenshots with each other. As a blogger myself, I know that I have a whole folder of screenshots taking up space on my computer. They aren't worthy of of the gig of storage they consume and they aren't important enough for me to bother uploading to flickr, yet I haven't deleted any of them just in case I need to reuse one at some point. Having a site where I could offload them would be incredibly handy.

Inspirational Designs of Shots of Web Sites?

In addition, flickr, being the big sharing site for photographers, is filled with photos with varying levels of copyright. Some you can use, some you can't, some you can if you link to a URL and give the photographers name, etc. On flickr, there are some people don't care if you use their image, but there are many others who think that it's worthy of link to their web site if you do so.

Personally (and I think many bloggers would agree with me on this), I don't think taking a screenshot of a web site or logo represents any special effort on my part, so I would have no problem uploading all my screenshots to a service like ScrnShots for others to use. And as a blogger, having a site filled with publicly available screenshots for use, worry-free, would be a great resource.

The site offers a bookmarklet that automatically tees up a page for what it calls "quoting." I'm not sure the application is much in the way of practical use, but it is quite nifty.

The reason I say that is because the service does not support full page screenshots (i.e., for taking shots of web pages that scroll below the fold) -- nor are those often displayed full size. I can't think of why a screenshot would need to be clickable unless you want to display an "active" version of an entire web page. If you're just taking a shot of a portion of a site with a few links, wouldn't it be easier and more practical to use text links?

Regardless, the application is fun and can certainly jazz up some screenshot content - even if there's no practical reason.