Show HN: MarqLink – take screenshots, add annotations, organize, and share

[ngenark]

I kept needing a good way to capture information while browsing, add my comments to it, and sometimes share it with others. Screenshots are great for this, but need hosting, an ability to comment or draw on them, tagging, and sharing features. While there are a ton of screenshot tools out there, none did it all, so I built my own.

I hope this is useful to you (I find it super useful for my other engineering projects) and would love any feedback.

[jeremyis]

This is cool. I find myself also often taking screenshots and sharing as a convenient source of info.

I also feel like when I share the screenshot - via slack, the million messaging clients my various friends / colleagues use, etc. - the context and convo is often lost.

I see the value here in unifying that data in one place - instead of the screenshot, I can just share a link and then go and find all the screenshots somewhere. I like that. Actually, now that I think about it, if you set the `og tags`[1], chat apps should also make an image preview when you paste a link (maybe you are already doing this - I didn't check) so it's a similar effect as what we do today but with the added benefits of cataloging / commenting / finding.

Congrats on launching. Who do you envision as the primary users and first niche use cases?

[1] https://ahrefs.com/blog/open-graph-meta-tags/

[ngenark]

Thanks! Open Graph tags are a great idea. I'm going to add them and push an update soon :) Like you said, this is an improvement over just dropping snapshots into slack, since you keep a lot more information with it (the original link and any conversation on that screenshot).

Initial use case: I think it's really useful if you're developing a website and want to screenshot bugs or feature requests, draw what it should do instead, and add comments (and dismiss when fixed!). I used MarqLink extensively for this while developing MarqLink.

[jeremyis]

Interesting. Do you know if anything like this has been built internally at tech cos?

[ngenark]

The inspiration was actually a tool called SnipIt that we used extensively at Alphabet. I really wanted that same tool outside the company, but with additional features (organization and comments) that SnipIt never had.

We used SnipIt all day long -- especially for screenshotting graphs, capturing bugs, and building presentations.

Of course, the weird thing is that inside Alphabet, everything was public across the company by default. This obviously doesn't work in a public product, so I'm curious to see if some kind of "default group sharing" setting ends up being needed, since everything is private by default now.