Fuck Gyazo
Gyazo is the worst screenshot uploader in human history. At best, it’s inconvenient, slow, and missing features: at worst, it’s a bandwidth-draining malware risk for everyone who views your images. There is absolutely no reason to use it unless you’re too lazy to spend 5 minutes installing another program.
- Uploading to Gyazo is extremely slow compared to most popular hosts.
- Every Gyazo page is bloated and slow to load: a 500KB file comes with 3MB of garbage.1
- Each page also loads over 20MB in ads2, choking your browser and risking malware infection.
- Your files aren’t saved to your PC for later, and even if you make an account, you can only see part of your history unless you pay up.
- Every time you use Gyazo, you advertise the service and spread bad software.
The alternative: ShareX
ShareX is fast, flexible, and can upload to almost any file host. It’s just as powerful as Gyazo out-of-the-box, but it also has a lot of features that Gyazo doesn’t:
- Record high-quality video in any format or framerate, with sound.
- Quickly edit and annotate screenshots without opening another program.
- More than screenshots: you can upload any file type to Google Drive, Dropbox, MEGA, etc.
- Configurable keyboard combinations for any of the above
- Look, just fucking read the features, it’s really good
If you still absolutely refuse to switch from Gyazo (perhaps because it’s holding your images hostage?), at least link people directly to your images.3 You’ll still have to deal with Gyazo’s slow servers and missing features, but at least your laziness will inconvenience other people slightly less.
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Not everyone has a gigabit connection. Slow 3G internet access is ubiquitous, and if you live in the US, it’s almost guaranteed to be data-capped. Lightweight pages are important. ↩︎
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Ad blockers aren’t available on every platform, and many people don’t use them out of ignorance or misguided morals. When you share images with Gyazo, you’re not just wasting bandwidth and CPU cycles: you’re putting these people at risk of malvertising, the most common malware risk. ↩︎
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Right-click your screenshot and copy the URL, then send that instead of the link Gyazo gives you. A direct link to the file will display nicely in all modern browsers, without Gyazo’s bloat or advertising, but you may give up rich embeds in certain applications.4 ↩︎
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Another reason to just bite the bullet and switch instead of halfassing. Gyazo embeds are kinda shit anyway. Why the hell do I need to see the name of the uploader twice? ↩︎