Surface Pro 4: how to capture, annotate, and share an image easily?

[beakerfullofsouth]

Hi everybody. New member here, and a new member of the Surface Pro 4 owners' club. I would like to share pen-annotated images frequently, and can't find a solid and efficient workflow. Can anyone help me?

More detail: several times a day, I would like to capture an image, write something on it, and then share it with someone else with my Surface Pro 4. I work in writing and publishing, so this could be something on the web, a digital photo, a portion of a manuscript, many things. What I want is an easy way to grab an image, doodle something on it with the Surface Pen, and then share it with someone else as a JPEG. I can get through the first two steps beautifully with OneNote and the eraser double-click, but I can't find an easy way to then export the annotated image out of OneNote to other services and social media (Facebook, Google Hangouts, Line, etc.)--this functionality is crucial, as many of the people I communicate with don't use OneNote. Right now I'm getting by by taking a screenshot of the annotated OneNote image, opening it up with MS Paint, cropping it, saving it as a JPEG, and then sharing. Not much fun when you need to do it as often as I do.

Capture, annotate, share: this would seem like something a lot of people would want to do, so perhaps there is some built-in functionality that I have totally missed, or maybe an app that could solve the issue for me easily? I would hope that the whole process would take about 15 seconds, but as it is, it takes me about a minute and a half. Please help a benighted noob! Thank you!

 

[RumoredNow]

Re: Surface Pro: how to capture, annotate, and share an image easily?

In Windows 10 I'm really getting a lot of mileage out of the Microsoft Garage App, Snip. Maybe give it a try?

https://mix.office.com/en-us/snip?previewvrg

 

[boltman2013]

Onenote.... See image...double click pen, select capture , drop into, the markup and share.

Super easy and elegant

 

[beakerfullofsouth]

Re: Surface Pro: how to capture, annotate, and share an image easily?

RumoredNow, thanks for the suggestion. Looks promising. I will give Snip a try!

 

[beakerfullofsouth]

boltman2013, thanks for your suggestion. I'm right there with you until the very end: the sharing part. Everything works beautifully until I want to share the marked OneNote image, and then the whole thing comes to a screeching halt. How, exactly, do I share?

I am well aware that I can share a note with other OneNote users, and when I press the "share" icon, I can also share it via some Windows Store apps such as Mail, but the problem is that many of the people I want to share with are not in the Microsoft ecosystem, and these are quick notes, not something I would want to dedicate an entire e-mail to. I need a general, open way to share an image (JPEG, PNG, or another wide format) with people on social media.

I am totally new at this, so I hope that it is indeed the case that I'm just too inept to see the solution right in front of my face. Can I do what I want to do with OneNote?

 

[m4600]

Since pages in OneNote are documents, not just images, PDF would be a better format for sharing than JPEG or PNG. PDF will preserve higher image resolution as well as all scalable fonts, vector graphics, and it will look much better when you print it.

Just print your document to PDF and share it as you wish!

On the other hand, if you prefer working with images rather than documents, then OneNote might not be the best tool for you in the first place.

 

[snakebitten]

Snipping tool has been my FAST method for support and training. I usually drop it in an email without even saving the capture as a file. Awesome tool.

But with the SP4, I'm so tempted to figure out a way to use that fancy Pen-doubleclick as a method. But so far the final step hasn't been as intuitive as the Snipping Tool.

We live in remarkable times. All of these tools were science fiction just a few short years ago.

 

[beakerfullofsouth]

m4600, thank you for your helpful suggestion. Being able to export and share as a PDF is helpful in many situations, but I would prefer to have a more generic image format, as these are easier to share across a variety of workflows. When I need a PDF, I will take your suggestion and go through OneNote.

Snakebitten, thank you for the tip about the snipping tool. I will give this a try as well. Indeed, that plus the elegant two-click with the pen would be a perfect solution.

But, what I really wanted to say was thank you to RumoredNow for suggesting Snip. This is almost exactly what I was looking for, and meets my needs well. It's elegant, easy to use, and I can share easily in a variety of formats, including JPEG and PNG. The added audio / movie functionality is just icing on the cake, and I look forward to playing around with it. The app is still in preview, but I hope that a lot of people will give it a try and that Microsoft will put some dev resources into it.

What puzzles me is that I searched for a good couple of hours through the MS Store and Google using a bunch of different terms ("capture share tool," "surface pen image capture," and on and on), and Snip didn't come up once. Either the discoverability is not there, or more likely, I wasn't searching the right way. Anyway you, the experts here at Windows Central have solved my problem. I hope that others searching for a similar solution can find this thread.

 

[unni_kmr]

Share Via Clipboard Windows app's description says it can share images as well.

 

[FXi2]

Use Greenshot Greenshot - a free and open source screenshot tool for productivity here - simple but effective and free.

 

[TechGuy6881]

The Windows Snipping Tool can be setup to be executed with a preferred clicking method on the SP4 pen using the Surface application and knowing the path to the Snipping tool which is C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Accessories. Simply go into the Surface app select which method you want to trigger the Snipping tool then select the option to run a desktop application and browse to the file path shown above and select the snipping tool.