Tag: screenshots

Free Screenshot Capture: Freeware Screen Grabber

Free Screenshot Capture (Version: 1.5.0 tested) is a freeware screenshot grabber that does a bit more. Upon install it presents a wizard (see image below) where its options and features are available at a glance. It also tries to register its default shortcuts to use. There is a likelihood that at least one (Ctrl+Shift+C for example) is taken by another application but the shortcut can be changed to something else via the Change Shortcuts options available by right clicking the program’s tray icon.

Free Screenshot Capture can be invoked via its shortcuts and via right click and of course by clicking on the aforementioned wizard. It can capture the full screen, part of the screen, full screen with delay, an elliptical region and also the webcam. Additional tools include a protractor, color picker, screen ruler, screen magnifier, screen brightness – to change screen brightness and gamma – and a whiteboard. The whiteboard is somewhat confusing, it prompts the user to choose one of the tools (text, rectangle or ellipse for example) and that tool is drawn on the screen to reserve that section of the screen for annotation or text to add to a screenshot. It seems that it works only for a full screen screenshot but that is not obvious.

After a screenshot is taken the program tools become visible. They include blur, shape, line, arrow or text. These can be added to the screenshot. An external editor or Microsoft Paint can be opened to edit the image as well. One can also directly save or copy the image.

Free Screenshot Capture also features a touch mode for tablet devices, the user can switch to it by clicking on the hand icon on the far top right of the program. It runs on Windows 2000 and newer.

July 31, 2012
Screenshot Captor, For The Power User

Screenshot Captor (Version: 3.00.00 portable tested for this review) is a feature rich and advanced screenshot program. Its main advantage is that it can do a lot of screenshots with minimum effort. It has eight capture modes, accessible using either the Capture menu, right clicking its tray icon or with select keyboard shortcuts. These keys (Configurable via Edit—>Preferences—>Hot keys) are for Entire workspace (Alt+PrtScr), Current screen (PrtScr), Active window (Ctrl+PrtScr), Selected region (Shift+PrtScr), Fixed size region (Ctrl+Alt+PrtScr), Windows object or scrolling window (Ctrl+Shift+PrtScr), Repeat last and finally Screen grab of Screenshot Captor’s own window. Screenshot Captor also supports delay and inclusion of the cursor in the screenshots.

The program’s interface is divided into a thumbnail viewer on the left, (last) screenshot area in the middle and tools to the right (and more on top and bottom too). The tools include a slider to zoom in and out up from 0 to 1000%. Other tools include launching an external image editor, adding shapes, blurring regions, adding text, clipart, picture frame effects and many more. The filename area, at the bottom, has extra information such as the source of the captured image and a field to rename the image to something else if necessary.

When an image is captured a dialog window lets the user take immediate action on the image captured with options to discard the screenshot, keep it, print it, save it elsewhere, copy it or its file name to the clipboard and more (see image below.)

The Windows object or scrolling window capture mode presents a red box with keyboard shortcuts to either grab toolbars or section of windows and – this is where the advanced part comes in – have Screenshot Captor detect vertical regions, like in a long webpage, and try to capture it for you.

Browse the program menu to get a feel of everything else Screenshot Captor offers. File menu has an option to add an image file as an object to an existing screenshot. Edit menu has a magic wand selection mode option to grab areas of matching color for example. SendTo menu can be configured to email a screenshot or to upload it using ZUploader. SpecialFX has watermark, splice out, glow and other enhancement features. Objects can add caption and merge or flatten images. Tools has a color picker with RGB and hex values. After browsing the menus look at the program Preferences and see the multitude of options and features available.

Screenshot Captor is now available in a zip portable version in addition to its self extracting .exe version. It works on Windows 98 and newer. It is one program that can live up to the ‘power user’ phrase. Also see its DonationCoder forum thread.

February 6, 2012
CaptureIt Plus: Simple Screen Capture

CaptureIt Plus is a simple and small screen capture or screenshot program. It sits in the system tray and can do one of nine captures modes. It can be used using the mouse or the keyboard. Right click on the tray icon to access one of capture options or set keyboard shortcuts or hot keys to take screenshots using the keyboard.

The capture modes are Scheduled, Repeat Last Capture, Active Window, Window, Circle, Fixed Region, Free Form, Full Screen and Rectangle. The Scheduled option doesn’t have a keyboard hot key setting, when it is chosen a window prompts for a delay – “Schedule capture after X seconds” – with a choice of any one of the windows open at the time or just full screen.

CaptureIt Plus’ output settings can be configured to save to another folder instead of the default Documents\My Pictures\CaptureItPlus location. The format and quality can be tweaked too. The output file name can be changed and there is an option to include the cursor in the capture.

Sound notification is available. CaptureIt Plus can send captures to the clipboard, default email program, editor or printer with hot key settings available for the clipboard, email and printer options.

CaptureIt Plus is licensed under GNU GPL and has plugin support which should be in development. The To Do section on the author’s site mentions Window scrolling – to capture webpages longer than the screen – support to come.

January 29, 2012
Freeware Shorts: Horizon33 (Screen Capture)

Horizon33 is an easy to use screen capture or screenshot program. It has useful capture and save options. Choose a combination of the options described below using the gear button to the left of the large capture button and then click the capture button itself to start taking screenshots.

There are six modes of capturing and Horizon33 can save the output in BMP, JPG, GIF or PNG formats. The capture options are full screen, active window, freehand, (configurable) fixed region, (selected) region and object. The output destination is also configurable. The options are save to file, save as, application (Microsoft Paint by default), clipboard, email, Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint or Excel) and upload to web (automatic saving to Imageshack). Multiple outputs is also an option with the capture ending up in more than one of the aforementioned destinations.

Additionally Horizon33 can automatically convert to grayscale, invert color, add watermark and resize too. Finally there is an option to include the cursor in the screenshot.

The program settings accessed via the top right button are divided into the following:

General for things like starting with Windows, delaying before capture, pressing X to close the application, staying always on top and others. Output to choose the default image format and destination for the multiple output operation. Effects has the options for color, resize and watermark. For example, here is the place to choose the file and position of the watermark or overlay image. Hotkeys lets the user assign keyboard shortcuts for any or all of the six capture options. File Name lets the user choose the output file name. Any combination of year to second is possible. A prefix and incremental numbering is available too. Dialogs includes JPG quality and fixed region options among others.

Horizon33 requires Windows XP and newer and is worth a download.

Note: In the image I used Horizon33 to capture this thread on the DonationCoder.com forum.

December 12, 2011
Freeware Shorts: SnapShot (Screen Capture)

SnapShot (Version: 1.0.4 as of this post) is a lightweight screen shot program or screen capture tool. It can take full screen, active window or rectangular area screen shots. By default it will only present a preview of the screenshot which the user can manually save. Using its preferences (Capture —> Preferences —> Save & Edit tab) auto save can be enabled with an option to not only choose the destination location but also a prefix for the file name. SnapShot is capable of saving files in BMP, GIF, JPG (JPEG), PCX, PNG, PSD or TIFF formats. Also from the same Preferences tab the output JPG quality can be configured. A path to an external image editor can be saved in the preferences for SnapShot to send or open the capture using it or optionally send the screen shot to the system clipboard.

SnapShot also features email and FTP to automatically send or upload a screen shot. Use the Edit menu to configure the email SMTP server and even choose the subject and text of the email and separately the FTP details.

SnapShot supports multiple monitors and supports setting a delay for taking screen shots. It should run on all Windows versions dating back to Windows 98.

November 20, 2011
Capture View: Freeware Screenshots Software

Capture View is a capture or screenshot taking program that looks slightly different than others of its kind. When opened the program looks like a transparent window opening to whatever is behind it, be it the desktop wallpaper or other open window. Capture View has several capture settings or methods and one of those is what is seen through the aforementioned interface. By moving or stretching Capture View’s own window the screenshot area can be adjusted.

To take other kinds of screenshots like the usual whole screen, individual window or others Capture View’s Type menu must be used. The same menu includes settings for automatically adding transparency, backgrounds, color invert and other effects to the captured screenshot. Delayed captures are also configurable here. The Alt+Q keys or the Capture button are two methods to take the screenshot itself.

Any thing captured, even if not yet saved, can be viewed using the Thumb Strip (accessed via the icon to the right of the small red square). Screenshots must be saved before the program is closed because captures are initially stored in a temp folder and are not automatically saved. The default image format can be changed from *.png to *.jpg, *.tiff or others. After a screenshot is captured one can resize it to preset sizes like wallpaper or any other arbitrary size – using the what the program calls a box to hover over the capture and keep only what the box sees – by right clicking on it inside the Capture View window or using the Crop menu.

Capture View does not have the most intuitive of work flows but does the job and with a few extras. The Description page on the program author’s site has a lengthy explanation of the more unusual features of Capture View.

February 17, 2011
Shotty: All In One Screenshots Freeware

Shotty strives to be an all in one screenshots program. It takes screenshots of whole screens, specified regions and windows. It has basic features to edit the captured shots and a few options for places to upload them too.

Left clicking the tray icon of Shotty presents you with capture options for the whole screen, region or specific window (for Windows Vista and 7 a high quality, aero enhanced option is given as well). After the capture a basic editor with a Microsoft paint like interface features things like cropping and adding text, highlights and shapes. A blur or diffuser can hide sensitive parts of the screenshot as well.

Further efficiency can be gained by using the default, but configurable, Ctrl + PrintScreen hotkeys in place of clicking the tray icon for the capture.

Finally the image can be saved or uploaded to one of the chosen locations online, Shotty in turn provides a window with the address of the uploaded image.

Right clicking Shotty’s tray icon exposes its other features:

The upload location can be chosen from one of Images.Devs-On.net (Shotty’s own hosting), ImageShack.us, DirectUpload.net, Imgur.com and UploadScreenshot.com.

The aforementioned hotkeys can be configured and assigned to save, copy or instant upload instead of the opening the capture or image editor.

A history of screenshots taken using Shotty can also be seen.

The optional delay – to take the screenshot – can be changed here as well.

Shotty requires the .Net Framework 2.0 and should run on Windows 2000 and newer versions.

February 13, 2011
JShot: Freeware Screen Capture And Upload

JShot is useful if often capturing (parts) of a screen and needing not only a program that does the capturing but one that automatically uploads it to the web. JShot can capture full screens, active windows, rectangular sections, the task bar and the desktop among others. It has a built-in editor with undo and redo support in addition to adding text and other effects to the captured image. The image editor does a lot more including but not limited to lines and shapes and other operations like resize, rotate, crop, merge and blur.

JShot comes pre-configured to upload anonymously to imageshack but out of the box it also supports uploading to FTP, Skype, Twitter, Picasa and Dropbox. These require setting up login details using the configuration wizard (accessed via the Ctrl+F12 keys by default). For example the Dropbox plugin tries to open the dropbox site and add the capture to the your Dropbox’s private or public folder. The aforementioned configuration wizard (also accessible via the tray icon) includes settings for such things as capture delay – how long after clicking to capture does it actually happen – output format – default is *.png – and multi-monitor support and more.

Plugins can be developed to support other sites to upload to. JShot keeps a history of of its captures (View—>History). When installing the user can choose to integrate it to the Windows right click or context menu. JShot requires Java Runtime Environment 1.6 and is free for personal use.

January 13, 2011
5DFly Free Photo Editing And Viewer

5DFly is a freeware image viewer with a set of basic and few extra and useful features. It loads single images (after double clicking them) into a tabbed interface making working with several images easier. It supports creation of slideshows in powerpoint (*.ppt and *.pps) formats. 5DFly also has built-in support for uploading pictures to Flickr and Facebook.

5DFly can convert an HTML page to an image. Here the user enters an URL which the program fetches to an internal viewer and generates an image from. This, in effect, is an alternative method for grabbing web page screenshots, one which grabs whole pages all the way to the bottom without the need to scroll down for longer pages.

The more readily available elsewhere features of 5DFly are batch processing for resizing photos and others like converting to gray scale, cropping freely or to predefined sizes, rotating, removing red eye and others.

Of further note are the history features available in the individual image view which lets the user undo any operations done on the image and also a web page history to keep tab on sites visited (for the *.html to *.jpg operation for example) using the program. Copying images to the clipboard and setting them as wallpaper are also possible with 5DFly.

Upon installation 5DFly associates itself with *.jpg and other image formats without prompting the user for input and it sports a Mac-like theme or skin. These two shortcomings will not be held against it today however!

5DFly runs on Windows 2000 and newer versions.

November 27, 2010
Simple Freeware: Screenshoter And Easy Image Modifier

Screenshoter is a basic, no-install utility to take or capture screenshots quickly and easily. Double click the program executable, choose full screen or area – to capture an area click on the area button, after choosing the area radio button, then click and hold the left mouse button and drag to choose a rectangular area – and then simply click the screenshot button. The image’s format can be changed from the default *.jpg to either *.png or *.bmp and the destination directory can be chosen too. Screenshoter’s options include controlling the name of the captured image and the quality of the *.jpg.

Easy Image Modifier from the same author is also no-install and works by either dragging images into the program window or by using the load option from the File menu. Images can be realigned, that is they can be rotated 90 and 180 degrees or flipped horizontally and vertically and resized by pixels or by percentage. The out put format can be one of *.jpg, *.png or *.bmp. Output file name can be configured to include any combination of a numbered sequence, it’s original name or size. The destination or output directory is configurable as well. The settings menu includes options to exit the program after processing images or to load or launch the output images. There is also an ‘Additional’ option where one can choose to sort images by such criteria as date and file size. Plus other options to maintain aspect ratio when resizing, to remove meta information (such as EXIF) and to reduce or increase the output image quality.

September 7, 2010