Free cloudapp alternative

A few of my colleagues and me are using Cloudapp a lot to share screenshots. Lately w were getting fed up with the nagscreens of Cloudapp to pay so i quickly assembled a homebrewn solution for use on our Macbooks.

What we want to do is implement the following workflow:

Whenever we use the default screen-capture functions of OSX (ex: cmd-shift-3 or cmd-shift-4), upload the resulting screenshot to imgur and put the link to the url in our pastebuffer.

How can we do that?

1. Monitor ~/Desktop for new .png files because OSX dumps screenshots on your Desktop. Here we’re going to use FSWatch.
2. Fswatch will call a little shellscript to upload to http://imgur.com and put the url in our pastebuffer with pbcopy.

1. The upload script

Put the following in ~/scripts/imgur.sh.

#!/bin/bash
# 
# Upload image to imgur and put the url to the image in paste-buffer
#
# You need to register a CLIENT_ID at https://api.imgur.com/oauth2/addclient
#

CLIENT_ID="YOUR IMGURL CLIENT ID"
API_BASE=https://api.imgur.com/3/image.xml
IMAGE=$1

# echo "Incoming: $IMAGE" >> /tmp/imgurl.log
if echo $IMAGE | grep -q "Screen Shot.*\.png$" ; then
 #echo "IS SS: $IMAGE" >> /tmp/imgurl.log
 IMGURL=`/curl -s -F "image=@$IMAGE" -H "Authorization: Client-ID $CLIENT_ID" $API_BASE | grep -E -o "<link>(.)*</link>" | grep -E -o "http://i.imgur.com/[^<]*"`
 # echo $IMGURL >> /tmp/imgurl.log
 echo $IMGURL | pbcopy
 /usr/local/bin/terminal-notifier -message "$IMGURL" -title "IMGUR Screenshot"
fi

Make sure to make the file executable afterward:

chmod +x ~/scripts/imgur.sh

2. On El Capitan: Send notification

We also want a little notification when the upload is complete. For this we need Terminal Notifier.

brew install terminal-notifier

3. The filesystem watcher

Install FSWatch:

brew install fswatch

Put the following in ~/scripts/imgurfswatch.sh:

fswatch -0 --event=Created --event=Renamed ~/Desktop/ |xargs -0 -n 1 ~/scripts/imgur.sh

This script needs to be executable:

chmod 755 ~/scripts/imgurfswatch.sh

4. Start it automatically on boot

We want to start up the watcher automatically when we boot. For this we use Launchd.

Insert the following in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.cjware.imgurl.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
 <dict>
 <key>Label</key>
 <string>com.cjware.imgurl</string>
 <key>RunAtLoad</key>
 <true/>
 <key>StartInterval</key>
 <integer>15</integer>
 <key>KeepAlive</key>
 <true/>
 <key>Program</key>
 <string>/Users/<YOUR USER NAME HERE>/scripts/imgurfswatch.sh</string>
 <key>StandardOutPath</key>
 <string>/var/log/cjware_fswatch.log</string>
 <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
 <string>/var/log/cjware_fswatch.log</string>
 </dict>
</plist>

Touch the log-file:

touch /var/log/cjware_fswatch.log

Make it execute on boot:

launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.cjware.imgurl.plist