Greenshot: Open Source And Easy Screen Capture

Greenshot is a lightweight program to capture parts or all of the screen. When the program is running it will, optionally, take over the Print (or Print Screen) button of the keyboard. It also uses the Ctrl, Alt and Shift keys that when clicked in conjunction with the Print key capture the active window, the whole screen or repeat the last capture respectively. When the Print key is used on its own Greenshot presents the user with a cross hairs to capture, by dragging the mouse, any rectangular region of the screen. In the program’s Preferences one can toggle off the aforementioned hotkeys and therefore use Greenshot by right clicking its tray icon. It is also possible to ask the program to capture the mouse pointer (cursor) or not. There is also a setting called ‘Use interactive window capture mode’ however I did not see anything different when it is toggled on or off.
There are various ways to control the actions of Greenshot after the capture is done. The Output tab in the preferences lets the user choose

• to open a capture in the program’s built-in editor,
• to copy it to the clipboard,
• to send it to printer,
• to show the save as dialog box,
• to save it without any dialog box or
• to email it

The same tab has the pre-configurable settings for the ‘save it without any dialog box’ option where one can define the default location for saving, naming rules and image format and quality of the capture.

The preferences’ Print tab includes such options as fit to page, rotate to fit paper orientation and center image.

The built-in image editor (see image, captured using Greenshot itself) lets the user draw shapes (rectangle, ellipse, line, arrow, etc.), write text or to crop the captured image. The editor’s Object menu and option, which saves *.gst format files, works as a sort of template or snippet. These *.gst files can hold shapes, arrows or text which can then be overlayed on subsequent screen captures or screen shots.

Greenshot is fast and is a 550KB download and should work on all Windows versions.