Sketchup Photobucket Question

[noddy67]

Is there a plugin for sketchup that will allow you to export a jpeg directly to photobucket (or a similar site) or does one have to save it initially to the desktop and then upload it subsequently in order to post an image to this site?

Thanks

 

[SketchUp Guru]

I don't know of any plugins that allow you to export an image directly out to a site although it might be possible. I would never want to do such a thing myself because I always end up cropping the exported image to get rid of excess background. I could avoid that by resizing my SketchUp window but that messes with the toolbars.

 

[noddy67]

Ok thanks for the quick response Dave. Do you then export an image out of sketchup to your desktop (or other folder) and then upload that to a photobucket type site? Just wondering if there was a more elegant solution than that. Are you a mac or pc user?

 

[adidat]

i found the best way to do it, was just take a screenshot then paste it into Microsoft paint then crop it. and save as a jpeg. or if your a mac user, screenshots save to desktop then just open in preview i think and crop it.

adidat

 

[SketchUp Guru]

I have both PC and Mac although I mostly work on the PC. I export the image out of SketchUp and save it to a folder. After editing the image in an image editor--for quick stuff that doesn't need much beyond cropping, I use Picasa--I open up my online album and upload the image.

I've migrated away from Photobucket to Flickr. I like the Flickr layout better and it easily gives me different size options with the links. For example I can easily post a small image like this:



Or a larger one, thusly:



from the same image. I generally (although not always) export from SketchUp at 3000 to 5000 pixels wide and even after cropping, the images tend to be quite large. Although I upload those large images, I don't have to make folks wait for them to load and on forums like this, those large images don't fit.

Making a Screen Shot is good if you want to show the axes but you end up with rather low resolution images which are not the best. I do use screenshots for tutorials because I want to show tools and sometimes toolbars. But when it's the model I want to show, I don't do that.

Here's a screen grab example. You can't show the selection like this in a normal export but the image quality isn't that great. It's a trade off.