You grabbed a screenshot, dropped it into a hosted-image tool, and pasted the link into Slack. Done in four seconds. Sometimes that is the whole job, and reaching for anything heavier would be a waste of everyone's time. Other times the receiver opens that link, sees a picture with no words on it, and replies "what am I looking at?" That reply is the tell that a bare image was the wrong container.
The choice between a hosted image and a captured still with a comment attached comes down to one question: does the receiver need to know what you meant, or just what you saw?
What a hosted image link is good at
A tool like Gyazo does one thing quickly: capture, upload, and hand you a URL. No comment box, no pin, no reply thread, usually no login step in your way. When you are showing a teammate an error message, confirming a build looks right, or dropping a reference into a chat you are already talking in, that speed is the point. The conversation carries the meaning; the image is just proof.
Where it runs out is the moment the image has to stand on its own. A URL to a picture has no place to say "the padding on the right card is wrong" or "this button should be disabled until the form is valid." You end up typing that context somewhere else, in a chat that scrolls away or an email that gets buried. The image and the meaning live in two different places, and the receiver has to reassemble them.
When you need the still and the comment on the same link
The other shape is a review link: a captured still with markings baked in and a written or spoken comment attached to it, all at one URL. This is the job Cobalt Capture handles as a Gyazo alternative when a hosted image is not enough. You click Capture screen, the browser grabs the current frame, you drop a numbered pin on the exact spot, and you say what is wrong out loud. Dictation runs on the browser's built-in speech recognition in Chrome and Edge, so a long note takes as long as saying it. On Firefox you type instead.
The pin and any arrows or boxes are drawn onto the still, not the live page, so whoever opens the link sees exactly what you marked without needing the site loaded. That matters when your reviewer is on a phone, on a different network, or looking at the link three days later. A cropped, marked still does not go stale the way a link to a moving page does.
The second difference is replies. On a review link, anyone with the link can comment on an individual item, and the owner can mark each one resolved. A hosted image has no such thread. If your teammate has a follow-up question, that lands back in chat, disconnected from the picture. For anything that takes more than one round, keeping the discussion on the same link is the difference between a resolved item and a lost one.
The receiver decides the format, not you
The same review link serves whoever opens it. A person gets a readable page at /s/<slug>, or you export a PDF or Word doc. A developer gets the marked screenshots and your notes in order. An AI assistant that opens the link is served clean markdown automatically, which is why the same capture works whether a human or an agent reads it. A bare image URL serves exactly one audience: a human looking at a picture.
If your feedback is going to someone who will act on it in code, the gap widens. A hosted image gives an agent a picture and nothing else. A review carries the pin, the comment, and the order, which is closer to what an agent-readable bug report actually contains. That is a secondary benefit, not the headline, but it is real.
Where the review link is the wrong tool
Be honest about the cost. A review link is more steps than a hosted image. If you are pasting a reference into a live conversation and nobody needs a comment attached, the extra machinery slows you down. Cobalt has a Quick shot shortcut for the middle case, one image with a pin and a note copied as a linked image, but for pure "here, look at this" a plain hosted image is faster and that is fine.
Cobalt Capture also is not a screen recorder. It grabs still frames, not video, so if the thing you need to show is motion, a stutter on hover or a broken transition, a still cannot carry it. It is not a bug tracker with assignees and workflow states either. It gives you comments and a resolved flag, not a board. If you need triage columns, that is a different tool. And it captures the browser tab, not the live page you are reviewing, so all markings sit on the frozen frame.
How to pick in the moment
Ask whether the image needs to explain itself. If the conversation around it carries the meaning and nobody needs to reply on the picture, a hosted image is the right size. If the image has to travel with its explanation, to a client, a developer, or an agent, and you want the answer to come back attached to the same thing, publish a review instead.
Both are free to start. Cobalt asks for an email only when a review is ready to send, and takes no card. Reviews stay editable for 7 days, then go read-only for you while the shared link keeps working for the people you sent it to; Pro at $5 a month keeps everything editable with no cutoff. If you want the full breakdown, the pricing page lays it out. When your next screenshot needs a comment stuck to it, start a review and skip the second message explaining what you meant.