Screenshot and Image Markup Just Got a Huge Re-Think

Why haven't screenshot and markup tools innovated in over a decade?

The Next Level of Collaboration

Now, here comes the real goose puppy. Imagine the same use case above. You took a screenshot using Markup Hero's desktop app (yay!). You sent that screenshot to five different colleagues using Markup Hero's shareable link. Now, imaging setting the permissions for each user so that they all had markup permissions. But instead of one messy canvas with 5 different people adding markup and no clarity around who said what, why not have proper collaboration, like Google Docs has done. And by the way, the former isn't even possible anyway with any of the current popular softwares from Skitch to Droplr and everything in-between. Markup Hero turns this paradigm on it's head by allowing collaborators to layer markup and feedback on top of each other. Users can show/hide the markup of others and add their own without overwhelming the canvas. Imagine and simplicity of Google Docs comments merged with the power of Photoshop layers.

How it's Been For Screenshot and Markup Software

For decades screenshot tools and image commentary software haven't had much innovation. In fact, many of the most popular tools like Jing, Skitch, Droplr and more haven't even been updated or are completely defunct in terms of support. Certainly no innovation there. Why is this? According to those few solutions, which represents just a few of the 100+ tools out there for this purpose, they serve nearly 20 million users. And for most people that take screenshots and give feedback via markup,  it's a daily activity — or at least every few days. So where's the innovation. It's time for a transformation. Enter Markup Hero - Annotate Anything and Love It.

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The Use Case for Markup

In the past, taking a screenshot and adding some markup like arrows, boxes, callouts, blurring content and other annotation tools has been a one-time thing. Most screenshot tools aren't great when you need to go back and update your markups. This can actually be pretty annoying for many users. Imagine you take a screenshot of a new ad your team just did. You add arrows and callouts explaining how it works and why you made this decision or another. Then you send the shareable link to colleagues or just paste the markup into Slack or email. That works ok until you realize you made a mistake or you want to change or amend your markup. Many tools don't allow this so you're stuck re-creating the entire markup from scratch. This is a total waste of time.

Re-Marking Up Images

We've addressed this issue by giving users the ability to store your entire markup history and go back and edit, add and even duplicate markups. This means you can easily update content you've sent to people. Take the use case above, if you sent them the Markup Hero shareable link, you can go back into the markup history and make changes whenever you want and those changes will be reflected in real-time for anyone viewing the link.​

Allowing Others to Markup Your Markup

Now, take the same use case just a little bit further. Say you want to take a screenshot of that same ad, but you want colleagues and other people to give YOU feedback directly. Well in most cases you send the screenshot, if those users have a markup tool then they open the screenshot or take a new screenshot and add markup and annotations. Then they copy and paste that markup, or maybe they even have to download it first, then paste it into Slack or wherever, and send it back to you. That's a lot of steps and now you've got multiple markups of the same image floating around. No tracking. No history. Total and utter confusion. The simple alternative is to just send them the sharable link from Markup Hero and let them add their own markup on top. You get notified your file has been viewed and/or edited and you can check the markup and commentary.​

The Next Level of Collaboration

Now, here comes the real goose puppy. Imagine the same use case above. You took a screenshot using Markup Hero's desktop app (yay!). You sent that screenshot to five different colleagues using Markup Hero's shareable link. Now, imaging setting the permissions for each user so that they all had markup permissions. But instead of one messy canvas with 5 different people adding markup and no clarity around who said what, why not have proper collaboration, like Google Docs has done. And by the way, the former isn't even possible anyway with any of the current popular softwares from Skitch to Droplr and everything in-between. Markup Hero turns this paradigm on it's head by allowing collaborators to layer markup and feedback on top of each other. Users can show/hide the markup of others and add their own without overwhelming the canvas. Imagine and simplicity of Google Docs comments merged with the power of Photoshop layers.​

What About Multiple Markups

How bout this use case. You start with a screenshot or file upload. Add some markup to it and send the shareable link around for feedback from others. The next collaborator decides he wants to take what you've already started and add his own annotations. But of course he doesn't want to just mess up your beautiful canvas. Instead, he just makes a duplicate of your markup and chooses to show it on the same page. Imagine the way Adobe PDF's deal with multiple pages. You have a page browser along the left side of your screen and you can seamlessly jump between pages. Well the same thing goes for Markup Hero. You can have as many markups on one screen as you like. You can set permissions for who can see or edit what. You can track viewed, manage edit history and really take your collaboration to another level.​

Final Thoughts

Ok ok, so yes, some of this stuff is still in development. But this is our plan. We're taking screenshots, markups, annotation tools and file types to another level. It's happening fast — we're releasing new features daily so it's probably only a matter of months before you can do all of the things mentioned in this article. So why not drop that old out of date Jing? Why not get rid of Skitch and switch of Evernote and start using Notion (if you haven't done this already, read this to see why you should switch from Evernote to Notion now). Why deal with the bloated and over-featured Snagit, which is nearly as complex as Photoshop nowadays. Give Markup Hero a try, it's already better than what you're using and you can see we're only going to make it better.