Picasa is a great photo manager with loads of features and a very high ease-of-use factor. If you regularly take screenshots however, you've likely noticed an annoying "feature"—a disk-gobbling screenshot function you can't turn off. Let's fix that. More »
Windows only: Screen capture tool Screenpresso takes screenshots of part of your screen, a specific window, or the whole screen with a shortcut key, then lets you edit, add effects, and even share with email or Twitter.
Once you've installed the utility, you can immediately begin taking a region capture of your screen with the Print Screen key—it's the same functionality you're used to from any number of great screen capture tools, but Screenpresso will guess the region you are trying to capture based on the position of your mouse, allowing you to capture just the content area of an application with a single click. You can still click and drag to select a specific region, but it’s a useful feature that could save you some time.
Once you’ve taken your screenshot, it will be saved into the history window, where you can access all of the screenshots you’ve taken, and either choose to share them with email or Twitter, or open them up in the included editor application, which lets you add arrows, shadows, text, or crop and resize the images.
There’s loads of other options to choose from, and while it’s still not quite got the polish of the reader favorite (and non-free) SnagIt screen capture tool, it’s a very capable free alternative that’s definitely worth a look. Screenpresso is a free download for Windows, though readers should note anonymous usage statistics can’t be turned off in the free version.
Windows only: Portable freeware application SiteShoter takes screenshots of web sites with a powerful array of features.
Using the utility, which (like all of the excelllent NirSoft applications) requires no installation, is easy—just add the URL to the web site you want to capture, choose a filename to save the image to, and click Start to save the screenshot. What makes this utility great is the wide range of powerful options, including a full-featured command line—you can place special formatting codes in the filename to specify a timestamp or add the URL to the filename, which becomes very useful if you wanted to save screenshots for multiple sites at once.
You can choose how often you want the screenshots to be taken—the default is every 5 minutes, but you could take a screenshot every few hours instead. Rounding out the great feature list is the ability to save your configurations for later re-use—you could use the GUI to save the options and create a command-line shortcut to run that configuration on demand.
SiteShoter is a free download for Windows only. For more great utilities, check out how to customize your right-click menu with ShellExView, or just look through our top 10 tiny & awesome Windows utilities.
Windows only: Tiny open-source application Lightscreen takes screenshots with a configurable hotkey and automatically saves them into a folder of your choice.
Lightscreen is a simple application designed to do nothing more than take screenshots, which are saved with a choice of JPG, BMP or PNG format to auto-numbered filenames and copied to the clipboard. Unlike the previously mentioned ScreenCaptor utility or the Snipping Tool built into Windows Vista, Lightscreen has no built-in editing or annotation tools, leaving any editing tasks to separate applications like Paint.NET. If all you want is screen capture directly to a file, this utility might be worth a look.
Windows Vista users will need to right-click on the setup application and choose “Run as Administrator” if installing to the Program Files folder. Lightscreen is a free download for Windows users. Thanks Paul!
