Firefox Developer Toolbar: Taking screenshots and uploading to Imgur in seconds

I used to use an add-on to take a screenshot and either save it to my desktop or upload it straight to imgur, what caused me to stop using it was I recently found out that this add-on decided that it would insert ads on pages! Now I’m not 100% certain it was causing my Firefox crashes, but lately I was experiencing them and that was the last thing on my mind, as it was just to take screenshots, not effect pages!

In an effort to replace this add-on I stumbled upon the Firefox developer toolbar, and how this exact process can be done with a simple command. One negative to this is I don’t think you can select a certain area that such add-ons can do.

How is it done?

First thing is you hit Shift+F2, which should bring up the developer console at the bottom of your page. FYI it stays on even as you switch tabs, so you can close the console again either by pressing the keys again or simply pressing the x on the right side.

Next you type screenshot (or you can type “s” and press tab). Then hit “-” and the options to either save it to your download folder or copy it to clipboard or upload it straight away to imgur.com (so you would type -i and press tab and enter and that’s it, a new tab with your screenshot is provided).

I do see the CSS selector so you could in fact inspect the elements and type out the exact div that you want to take a screenshot of, however not as easy as simply dragging to your preferred area, but may be useful if you find yourself taking regular screenshots of a certain page.

Copy paste option: “screenshot --imgur” and that should do it all for you. Later on, if you open the console again, just hit the up arrow key and press enter, thus you don’t need to repeat.

The downside to this is the screenshot, once uploaded to imgur seems to link you to the raw/direct image, skipping the page that gives you the delete URL, this may be bad if in the event the screenshot is wrong or contains information that you wish to not make public. I think once this gets adjusted and also adding maybe a selection area, then this would be perfect to replace any addons that do this.

To read more about the Firefox developer console, look here https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/GCLI

What else is useful?

Ever closed a tab by accident? Well use Ctrl+Shift+T to recover it.

 

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