If you spend enough time on the internet, chances are you are no stranger to the sometimes elaborately complex task of taking screen captures, cropping/enhancing them using your photo editing software, and uploading them to a photo hosting service before you can finally share them.

Now, I know a lot of you have your own ways to shorten this process. Personally, I use a combination of OSX’s grab, Adobe Photoshop and this handy ImageShack Image Upload Dashboard widget for the Mac.

I’ve been pretty much happy with the aforementioned combination until I found something that does the job in a more convenient, more streamlined fashion. Techsmith, a company specializing in screen capture and recording software has a service that does exactly that. And more.

The concept behind The Jing project is an always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video from your computer to anywhere. Aside from providing a simple yet functional desktop interface which allows you to take screen shots, Jing also also allows users to make simple annotations to screen captures before storing and allowing users to share them using Techsmith’s ScreenCast service.

This is particularly useful for people who frequent message boards looking for an easy way to share things they find on the web or for people looking for a way to provide support using a robust instructional aid.The features I highlighted are impressive enough but Jing takes it to an whole new level by allowing users to create a video of anything you see on your computer. So instead of typing thousands of letters explaining how to enable POP in Gmail to your computer illiterate dad, you can simply use Jing to record a video showing him exactly how to do it step by step, click by click.

Jing’s blog has this sample video.All in all Jing is a solid service. My only gripe so far is Jing’s output is limited to sharing images and video hosted on ScreenCast. It would be nice to see direct link outputs for images and an embed feature for video. These would be extremely useful to people looking to embed instructional material using Jing-captured images and video on their site.

Update: A member of Techsmith’s development team emailed me to let me know that you can, in fact, embed video on your site.

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