Screen capture programs?

jfriend

I find myself often doing screen captures these days. I'm using the old-fashioned way of Alt-PrtScr, fire up Photoshop, new image, paste in clipboard, crop, save to JPEG. This workflow works, but sometimes it seems a little cumbersome when all I want to do is grab a screen shot, crop it to the desired area, then save to a JPEG - particularly if I have 5 or 6 to do.

Do any of you use any purpose-built screen grab programs that would be faster that what I described above?

David_S85

There's lots of freebies out there that will capture many images and save them in turn, but I've never needed to save more than one or two screens at any one time.

Old Trick:
If you are trying to save the top-most open dialog box, use ALT + PrtScr which will only capture the boundry inwards. Then paste in any image application to save.

colourbox

I like HyperSnap a lot, but it isn't free. It has advanced features like pointer capture, timed capture, region capture, etc.

pathfinder

jfriend wrote:

I find myself often doing screen captures these days. I'm using the old-fashioned way of Alt-PrtScr, fire up Photoshop, new image, paste in clipboard, crop, save to JPEG. This workflow works, but sometimes it seems a little cumbersome when all I want to do is grab a screen shot, crop it to the desired area, then save to a JPEG - particularly if I have 5 or 6 to do.

Do any of you use any purpose-built screen grab programs that would be faster that what I described above?

I have always used Grab, but like you, always had to open PS to convert the tiff to a jpg to save. The two step slow step workflow was always annoying. While researching this question, I found a solution for those of us on a Mac. It is not obvious, but just use Preview.

Open Preview, File>Grab> Selection or Window Then after your selection, File > Save> and a drop down box offers different choices to save in as shown in the attached file that I grabbed while in Preview. Cool little shortcut that I just found this morning. You can even adjust the image size in Preview, in inches or Pixels so you can match Dgrin's 800 pixel maximum dimension requirements.

Andy

World Class screen grabs for Macs is Skitch. I can go from grabbing to posting in literally seconds. And yeah, you can annotate, etc

World Class for Windows OR Mac is Jing.

jfriend

Andy wrote:

World Class screen grabs for Macs is Skitch. I can go from grabbing to posting in literally seconds. And yeah, you can annotate, etc

World Class for Windows OR Mac is Jing.

Jing looks pretty cool. Thanks.

du8die

I use Mezer from Bayden Systems. First thing I install on any PC I work on. I use it almost daily.

http://www.bayden.com/mezer/

Lots of options... And it's free.

aj986s

I like using Printkey2000 v5.10. It should still be available for free. Allows full screen or rectangular area grabs. Works in Vista and earlier.

chuckinsocal

I tried Jing last night for the first time and had two issues with it:

1. I couldn't find a way to resize the image so all I could post was a full screen sized image which is too large for the forum IMHO. You can see the effort here.

2. Jing gives you a url to link to the image but it is in html so you have to manually convert that to VB Code to display on the forum. A little tedious.

Another nit is that the annotation options are quite limited.

I wouldn't say that it is world class, but is is somewhat functional plus it's free so who am I to critisize it? But, I'm sure there are better options out there, even if you have to pay a few bucks. Just my nickels worth.

jfriend

chuckinsocal wrote:

I tried Jing last night for the first time and had two issues with it:

1. I couldn't find a way to resize the image so all I could post was a full screen sized image which is too large for the forum IMHO. You can see the effort here.

2. Jing gives you a url to link to the image but it is in html so you have to manually convert that to VB Code to display on the forum. A little tedious.

Another nit is that the annotation options are quite limited.

I wouldn't say that it is world class, but is is somewhat functional plus it's free so who am I to critisize it? But, I'm sure there are better options out there, even if you have to pay a few bucks. Just my nickels worth.

The way I use Jing is I drag out just the rectangle of the screen that I want to grab which is usually a lot smaller than full screen and is appropriate for posting.

The annotation options are limited, but the ones they have are way, way easier than Photoshop. For example, if you want to draw an arrow that points at something that takes 2 seconds in Jing and I still don't know how to do that in Photoshop. I'd say it's 100% of what I need 80% of the time which makes it a big time saver for me. The other 20% of the time, I just save to my hard disk and then open that in Photoshop. I haven't used their web hosting yet. I just save the image to disk and upload to my postings gallery on Smugmug and then I can link to any Smugmug size I want.

Nikolai

aj986s wrote:

I like using Printkey2000 v5.10. It should still be available for free. Allows full screen or rectangular area grabs. Works in Vista and earlier.

+1 on PrintKey200, been using it since 2001, great little app!

chuckinsocal

You're right John, I did take a pretty large width grab and a smaller width would have produced a smaller image so I do have to take part of that comment back.

I used their web hosting option because I thought it would be more efficient than saving, uploading, then linking and it probably is except for modifying the code. If I continue using Jing, I'll just have to get used to it.

I'm not saying the program is all that bad, but it could be better, and it is a work in process so it will probably get better in time. And, it was my first try at it so maybe I'll get better in time too.