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April 25, 2013

Screen Capture Tool Rate

Often easy way to report a bug is to make picture of screen. Until that day I had to use Gadwin tool for that purposes and if I needed to do some marks - I used MS Paint. But that process is taking quite a lot time and effort, so I decided to find a new tool to capture and edit pictures faster and easier.

I had further requirements:
* The tool have to be free;
* It should work on Windows 7;
* It should work at background;
* It should have hot-keys;
* It should save files in popular extensions, such as JPEG or PNG (hello, Snag);
* The process should be done with minimal amount of clicks.

So I downloaded some tools and started to rate them.
Here are tools, that are too complicated in the first step, so I unistalled them right after opening:
* SnapShot
* Screenshot Captor
* SnapDraw
* Screen Grab Pro
* Puush
* EasyCapture
* Screen Hunter

Here are tools, that passed the smoke test:
Tool Background 1-key Start Editing Extentsion Fast
Jing Yes Yes Yes Yes
Gadwin PrintScreen Yes Yes Yes
DuckCapture Yes Yes Yes Yes
Lightscreen Yes Yes Yes Yes
Cropper Yes Yes Yes
Snipping Tool Yes Yes
Capture View Yes Yes
FastStone Capture Yes Yes Yes Yes
Greenshot Yes Yes Yes Yes
Horizon33 Yes
Lightshot Yes Yes Yes Yes
PrtScr Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
ScreenPresso Yes Yes Yes Yes
VVCap Yes Yes Yes Yes


As you can see, all yeses have only one tool - PrtScr. So PrtScr it is!

Why PrtScr is cool:
a) I click "Print Scrn";
b) holding mouse right button I highlight something (+Ctrl if you want a rectangle);
c) with mouse left button I select the capture area (+Ctrl to rectangle);
d) I have a JPEG file in the specific place, without any edit or save buttons.

Example of the result:


Why PrtScr is not perfect:
There is no undo command: if you did 2 selections and the 3thd was incorrect, to fix that you should start all over again.

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