Recommend screen-snipping tool?

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I have a netbook with Windows 7 Starter Edition. This does not have the Windows 7 Snipping Tool, which I often need.

Can anyone recommend a low cost, light weight snipping tool that I could install? I don’t need fancy features (like SnagIt has): just the ability to snip a rectangular region of the screen would fill my needs.

Thanks,

Don

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This is apparently a free snipping tool lookalike: Capture Screenshot lite

Bruce

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Irfanview has a nice capture feature.

cheers, Paul

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Ashampoo Snap 7 is a capture program with a ‘regular price’ of $20, which I can get today (as a returning customer) for $4. Once you buy anything from them that gets you on their list, as I have, all manner of deals turn up from time to time. If you don’t mind some ads in your mail, some of the deals are indeed good. They have ‘their’ Office 2012 right now for $4.99, which has a ‘regular price’ of $60. It is actually SoftMaker Office, which is among the lesser-known alternatives to Microsoft Office, and it can be installed on a flash drive for portability. I have both products, but pricing is interesting, and presumably calculated to keep you coming back for more (until you’ve bought everything in the store).

FastStone Capture is the other major program I have, and it is shareware. I recommend this, and I suggest you give it (or their other products) a try. You might find that you are shooting too low in wanting something simple, and that the added features are worth having once you learn to use them.

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Have a look at ScreenShoter 1.92. It’s simple, portable and free.

Hope this helps…

(I prefer the more capable SCREENSHOT CAPTOR VERSION 4 and donated $15. YMMV.)

Hope this helps…

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Yes, it really does help. ScreenShoter is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

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(I prefer the more capable SCREENSHOT CAPTOR VERSION 4 and donated $15. YMMV.)

I also prefer Screenshot Captor. It is small and memory-resident, so is always available. A simple press of the ‘Print Screen’ key will capture the entire screen and automatically save it to my screenshot folder (which you can set up in options), or pressing ‘Shift – Print Screen’ allows me to define the area I want captured. There are lots of other options if you want it to do more for you (which I rarely use). After looking at lots of screen capture programs, this one fit my needs perfectly.

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I think there must be a million capture programs by now, but if you have Office you may already have one without realizing it. In fact I think a lot of programs now have some such capability built in, if only we could remember them when we want them.

In MS Word (2010), for example, you can go to the ‘Insert’ tab, click the ‘Screenshot’ icon on the ribbon, and you can create a screenshot then and there, to use that screenshot in Word itself or in other Office programs, such as PowerPoint. Since it is treated as a picture, you can click it in Word and ‘Picture Tools’ will appear on the ribbon, and you have Word’s own picture tools to edit it. It’s fun.
Editing: I had the explanation of how that works scrambled, and will re-post when I can clarify it. It is powerful and well-integrated, and in Office 2013 you can also copy video and insert that into Office programs.

XnView is similar to IrfanView in scope, it is free, and it has fairly simple capture functions, along with refined graphics capabilities. I have no idea how resource-hungry these programs may be, but that is a favourite of mine, although I have never used it for screen shots.

Screenshot Captor does indeed look like a nifty tool, but I think FastStone Capture was the only software to advertise the ability to save the picture to PDF. (Obviously Word can do the same, and since it’s a picture and not OCR’d text, I don’t see it as a big deal.)

I was sufficiently intrigued by Screenshot Captor to give it a try – it looks like serious fun.

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Thanks to Gizmo’s Hot Finds we have a new contender for top spot among open source screenshot software. It’s called Greenshot, which rhymes with screenshot. I told you there must be a million of them, and now I have this in my collection for comparisons.

Gizmo’s Hot Finds is a frequent newsletter to which you can subscribe, but he also has a compilation of his finds, Gizmos Freeware Reviews, that you can bookmark and check any time you are looking for free software. I should have thought of looking there myself before I posted.

As for screenshots from within Office, it worked well for me the first time I tried it, but it’s more complicated than I thought, and I am re-learning it myself.

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I struggled with Screen Capture for years, before I finally realized that Windows has had that feature for….like….forever.

It’s the Screen Print key, (PrntScrn) on the top right of the keyboard.
Get what you want on the screen, then press the key. The entire screen is transferred to the Windows Clip Board.

Then you can do a PASTE of your screen image into any graphics program you choose…. even Windows Paint. (Not my first choice, however.)

Personally I use a little French Program called “Photo Filtre” that does almost everything that Adobe Photo Shop can do.
Crop, resize, add or remove contrast, add text to the picture, just about everything you’d ever want to do to something you just captured.
Oh….did I mention, “Photo Filtre” is FREE. Can’t find it? Maybe I can help.

Just a thought……

Cheers Mates!
The Doctor

http://www.photofiltre-studio.com/pf7-en.htm

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Thank you for that tip Doc.

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I struggled with Screen Capture for years, before I finally realized that Windows has had that feature for….like….forever.

It’s the Screen Print key, (PrntScrn) on the top right of the keyboard.
Get what you want on the screen, then press the key. The entire screen is transferred to the Windows Clip Board.

Then you can do a PASTE of your screen image into any graphics program you choose…

Exactly what I have done for yonks…but I usually paste into IrfanView because it is so much easier to adjust the screenshot to what I want.

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I struggled with Screen Capture for years, before I finally realized that Windows has had that feature for….like….forever.

It’s the Screen Print key, (PrntScrn) on the top right of the keyboard.
Get what you want on the screen, then press the key. The entire screen is transferred to the Windows Clip Board.

If you hold the Alt key when pressing PRNT SCRN then it only captures the active window. This can sometimes save a bit of cropping later in many cases.

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Screenshots in Office are a curiosity as much as a practical matter. This is an Office feature, and should not be confused with Windows’ own Snipping Tool, which may be found in Accessories on the Windows 7 Start Menu, or by literally typing ‘Snipping tool’ in the search menu in Windows 8.1. They sure don’t make it easy to get to. ‘Insert a screenshot or screen clipping’ in Office ‘Help’ offers one description of the Office feature.

The Office Screenshots feature is available in Microsoft Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word. I don’t know how long it has been around, but it is similar to and associated with the longstanding ability to insert clipart or stock photos in Office applications such as Word, or similar things in (including sound clips) in PowerPoint, or business cards or contact photos in Outlook, etc.

From a user’s perspective you are already in Office and you are at an insertion point when you want to insert something. Say you are in Outlook and have followed a link, which means that you now have at least two programs running – Outlook and the browser you used to follow a link – and you want to copy the photo of the company’s plant in the browser into the contact information in Outlook, or into a different Office program, say Word. If you open Word you will have yet another program running, and you will have an insertion point in Word. Click the Insert tab on the ribbon, then the Screenshot icon on the ribbon. This will give you ‘Available windows’ which will typically include views of all the programs that are running (and/or the desktop).

When you pick a view it will be crazy hazy until you find exactly what you want to copy, select the conventional capture window with your cursor, and the haziness will disappear. I don’t think you can do it in 2010 but in 2013 you could, for example, copy a YouTube movie clip for use in a PowerPoint demo. You can insert movie clips in Word (2013), but obviously not for print output.

It’s interesting to know it’s there, and you can use the clipping tool exactly like any other clipping tool. It might, however, guzzle resources because you may have any number of major programs running at once, and the biggest problem from my perspective that while it’s convenient to send out for clippings and pizza when you’re in Office, I think most of us work from the other end, which is to say we run across things while browsing that we want to clip and save for future reference or use, and the third-party clipping tools we use are easy on resources.

That, as it happens, is where the open source Greenshot has an astonishing feature: it does what the Office version does, but in reverse. A Greenshot screenshot can, from within Greenshot, start an assortment of Office programs that covers more territory than the built-in capabilities of Office: it can start Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel and OneNote, and you can take it from there, with Greenshot screenshot in hand, to insert at the location of your choice.

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Hi Don, this little, free program, will do everything you would want.
Give it a try, RGSmith

http://www.infonautics.ch/screencaptureprint/

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Sounds like you found what you needed but allow me to give a mention to a useful extension for Chrome browser called Awesome Screenshot. It’s free and has worked on our two PCs for a couple of years with great success. It has an icon in the top right corner of your browser, and you click on it get a dropdown menu where you select visible page, entire page (for long pages where you would normally have to scroll down to view it), or selected area which lets you drag your mouse pointer around any area of the screen you wish to capture. After you select, your chosen screenshot opens in a separate window where you can type comments, draw arrows, use different colors to highlight stuff, etc. Click on “Done” anytime you wish and save the screenshot or send it to someone immediately, your choice. This extension is free, of course!

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I have a netbook with Windows 7 Starter Edition. This does not have the Windows 7 Snipping Tool, which I often need.

Can anyone recommend a low cost, light weight snipping tool that I could install? I don’t need fancy features (like SnagIt has): just the ability to snip a rectangular region of the screen would fill my needs.

Thanks,

Don

Can you not just hit Print Screen to put the page on your clipboard, then paste it your application and finish by cropping the page to whatever you need?

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just the ability to snip a rectangular region of the screen would fill my needs. Thanks, Don[/QUOTE] I’ve used most of the aps suggested here and found Greenshot to be the best for me (no sidebars or other hassles and set a function key to activate) but to just grab a selection of screen your best bet is to stick a shortcut to the Windows inbuilt screen snipper. Simple. http://windowssecrets.com/forums/images/smilies/rolleyes.gif

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If somehow you no longer have the Snipping Tool shortcut look for it here:
Start > All Programs > Accessories > Snipping Tool

If you have lost the shortcut, it is normally located in C:WindowsSnippingTool.exe

If you find it there, right click it and select SendTo > Desktop (create shortcut), and it will put a shortcut to it on your desktop. Now you can right click the Start orb and select All Users, and move it to Programs or Accessories to have it show up in your Start Menu. You can also move it to the left side of the Task Bar (next to the orb) by dragging it there.

BUT there are alternatives out there that are easier/nicer to use. ScreenHunter 5 Free from Wisdom Soft, http://www.wisdom-soft.com/ is a good simple one. So is PicPick, http://www.PicPick.org/. Both make it very easy to select a rectangular portion of the screen, work with hotkeys, will save to a file in a directory you set or just the clipboard. PicPick comes with it’s own nicer-than-Paint editor that includes arrows and shapes and stamps and more.

I recently moved to PicPick as ScreenHunter does not support two monitors. I don’t use the image editor.

PicPick also includes a Color Picker, an on screen Pixel Ruler, a Protractor (measures angles on the screen) and more. Both Screen Hunter and PicPick run with minimal resources and are very well behaved. Neither will lock up your system or cause problems. You can set either one to start with your system and initiate them with a hot key when you need to take a screen shot.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you want to be a little adventurous, download Irfanview from irfanview.com, and then download and install all the add-ons. Irfanview is one fantastic program. Open any image in it and you can click through all images in that directory. It will also open pdf files as will as mp3s and several video formats.

To set it for screen shots, go to options > Capture ScreenShot, and this window will open,

It should be easy to figure out; When you want to capture a screen area, open IrfanView and hit what ever Hot key you selected. Then drag your rectangle as you want it. Click the mouse and the area you dragged will show up in the main Irfanview screen. From there you can adjust and or edit it as you would with Paint, except the ‘paint’ tools (available at Edit > Show paint dialogue (or hit F12)) are much more powerful than Windows’ paint. Also, several of the add-on effects are the same plug-ins that come with Adobe Photoshop. Again, like the above screen shot tools, IrfanView uses minimal computer resources and is very well behaved.

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Kind of surprising no one has mentioned Lightshot which can be found at: https://app.prntscr.com/

After installing it (it’s FREE btw), there are other ways of using it, but perhaps the easiest is to:
1) Hit PrntScr.
2) drag a box around what you want to capture (and yes, you can adjust the box after dragging it roughly around what you want.)
3) Decide what you want to do next using the menus along the lower right edge of the box.

You can also annotate by drawing lines, boxes, and text, as well as change the color of those annotation items. You can undo annotations. You can share to twitter, google+, pinterest, facebook, etc. You can save the image to the cloud (for FREE) and get a link to paste in places like these forums. Otherwise, you can save locally, print, or copy to the clipboard.

Since I found Lightshot, I totally stopped looking. It’s truly wonderful, free software.

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The one thing I really like about Irfanview is the timed capture. Makes pictures of context menus a snap.

cheers, Paul

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The one thing I really like about Irfanview is the timed capture. Makes pictures of context menus a snap…

Other posters to this thread have suggested screenshot programs which run full-time (i.e.: they start with Windows and remain running whilst Windows is running – unnecessary use of resources).

The thing I like most about IrfanView is that it does not need to start with Windows; I can start IrfanView any time I want it simply by pressing Ctrl-Alt-I (or whatever keyboard shortcut I specify in IrfanView’s shortcut dialog).

Nevertheless the built-in Windows 7 “Snipping Tool” ((StartAll ProgramsAccessoriesSnipping Tool) is quite useful in some circumstances.

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I use Gadwin Printscreen on my home system and a paid program Hypersnap on my work machine. I prefer Hypersnap because it is so customizable and you can grab just a pixel if you want, but the free Gadwin program works nearly as well. What I don’t like about Window’s Printscreen is that most of the time I just want a grab of a part of the screen and don’t want to copy the whole thing and then dump it into another program to crop and size and save, the two I use don’t require anything but themselves and work really well, intuitively too. :^)

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I also use Pickpick.exe. It is portable app, no need to install.
I ran it sandboxed and verified that Pickpick did not write to registry nor call-home, aka clean portable app.

If you use Firefox as browser, addon “Screengrab!” can do same on web pages. it allows customed (rectangular) selection of area (inside Firefox, not the entire screen area), and ALSO can grab the entire web page even if the web page is so large and off window.
So far this is the best addon for entire-page capture for me.

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PicPick (http://www.picpick.org) is free, can be set to reside in memory to be available on the press of a key (you select the hot key, I use PrtScn), and offers some editing and drawing tools. I also use Irfanview and if I had learned of its screenshot capability before getting used to PicPick, I might use it exclusively.

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I have a netbook with Windows 7 Starter Edition. This does not have the Windows 7 Snipping Tool, which I often need.

Can anyone recommend a low cost, light weight snipping tool that I could install? I don’t need fancy features (like SnagIt has): just the ability to snip a rectangular region of the screen would fill my needs.

Thanks,

Don

The one I have used and still do when I’m capturing more than one item that is the same size is called SnapShot and can be downloaded from ” http://download.cnet.com/SnapaShot/3000-2094_4-10758085.html “. As I have stated it is free and really does do a great job. I even suggest this to most of my students at the college where I teach.

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EagleMaster1245, your first post looks a bit advertorial. It’s worth mentioning the software you recommended is a cut down version of a commercial product, just so we all understand what you are recommending.

cheers, Paul

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For basics, like a JPG in web page, try Paint or Photo Gallery. I think Photo Gallery is in XP.

For me, I like to size my JPG by pixel. In Win 8.1 Update, Paint and Photo Gallery allow resizing by % or pixel.

For screen captures, I also use [Alt][Prt Sc] to capture only the active window. I paste into Paint because the default is BMP, and I save that as an original. Then I resize and Save As JPG. Or, most often, paste into a document for PDF. The reason for BMP is I find resolution better. When you paste a JPG into some programs, the program helps you by changing the resolution to fit your layout. I don’t alway agree with the automatics.

Good luck.

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Hi Don,

Probably a bit late now but I can recommend a Free programme for personal use called Gadwin PrintScreen . It comes in 32 & 64bit versions and I’ve used it for about five years with no trouble. Simple to use and they have just updated the control panel (vers. 5.4.2)

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Just go to the CMD prompt and type in snip…then pick and use the Windows provided snipping tool.

K

I have a netbook with Windows 7 Starter Edition. This does not have the Windows 7 Snipping Tool, which I often need.

Can anyone recommend a low cost, light weight snipping tool that I could install? I don’t need fancy features (like SnagIt has): just the ability to snip a rectangular region of the screen would fill my needs.

Thanks,

Don

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Just go to the CMD prompt and type in snip…then pick and use the Windows provided snipping tool.

K

Windows 7 Starter Edition does not include the snipping tool (as stated in the question you quoted).

And even if it did, typing snip at a CMD prompt would only get you “not … recognized … command”.

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OK, I have never seen the Win7 starter edition (I wonder if that qualifies for the upcoming “free” Win10 upgrade. My Win7 here (not the starter edition) has it.

So, if you go to the “Start” button, click it and type in “snipping tool” or some initial part of that string in the “search programs box), the starter edition doesn’t “search” for that?

I didn’t mean to go to a DOS prompt if that is what you did (I probably didn’t word that as well as I could have initially).

K

Windows 7 Starter Edition does not include the snipping tool (as stated in the question you quoted).

And even if it did, typing snip at a CMD prompt would only get you “not … recognized … command”.

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OK, I have never seen the Win7 starter edition (I wonder if that qualifies for the upcoming “free” Win10 upgrade. My Win7 here (not the starter edition) has it.

Only Enterprise and RT have been excluded.

So, if you go to the “Start” button, click it and type in “snipping tool” or some initial part of that string in the “search programs box), the starter edition doesn’t “search” for that?

Yes, but it’s not there.

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So, I wonder what purpose the Win7 starter edition has then?. Not sure I have heard of this before. What would MS gain by omitting the snipping tool. If only Enterprise and RT are excluded from the Win10 upgrade then the OP would gain by going that route when offered later in the year.

K

Only Enterprise and RT have been excluded.

Yes, but it’s not there.

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So, I wonder what purpose the Win7 starter edition has then?

It was only available pre-installed on netbooks, as it was a cheaper OEM license for manufacturers, but had many restrictions.

For consumers it was an option above XP for only $30 extra, but you couldn’t even change the desktop wallpaper:

What is Windows 7 Starter Edition?

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Thanks, Bruce…live and learn, huh?

K

It was only available pre-installed on netbooks, as it was a cheaper OEM license for manufacturers, but had many restrictions.

For consumers it was an option above XP for only $30 extra, but you couldn’t even change the desktop wallpaper:

What is Windows 7 Starter Edition?

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