The other day a student needed help embedding a YouTube video onto our class blog. Within seconds I had taken a screenshot of the WordPress New Post toolbar, circled the appropriate icon, pasted the image into an email, and sent it off to the student. Immediately afterward I realized that the tool I had used---Greenshot---was worth sharing with ProfHacker readers.
Unlike Macs, Windows has never had robust screen capture abilities built right into the operating system. Windows 7 includes the little known Snipping Tool, which allows you to capture portions of your screen, but Snipping Tool doesn’t run in the background (i.e. you have to open it every time you want to use it) and it offers only limited post-capture editing capabilities (you can highlight or draw freehand on a portion of the screen-captured image).
Greenshot, on the other hand, resides quietly in your desktop tray, and it features a range of capture and editing capabilities. And what better way to introduce these capabilities than showing a screenshot of Greenshot, which I took with Greenshot:
There’s a range of output options: directly to the clipboard or a printer, saved as a file, sent as email, or opened up in Greenshot’s built-in image editor. And it’s Greenshot’s built-in editor that I used to annotate this image. It’s a breeze to add text, shapes, and arrows. The editor can even obfuscate portions of the image you’d rather not make public.
Greenshot’s editing interface is a breeze to use, and what better way to illustrate the interface than to show a screenshot of the above screenshot in that interface:
If I had wanted to, it would’ve been easy enough to annotate this image as well, highlighting the various shapes, arrows, text, and cropping tools on the left side of the screen. But I might have blown your mind with this meta screenshot, so I didn’t.
I’ve tried dozens of screen capture utilities on my Windows machine, and Greenshot is by far my favorite. It’s lightweight yet powerful, useful yet unobtrusive. It’s made my life easier, both as a teacher and a researcher. And finally, the best part about Greenshot? It’s free and open-source.
[Net, Chain & Shackles image courtesy of Flickr user J.D. Page / Creative Commons License]