If you are a developer or web master or in the marketing field, no matter what profession you are in you sometime needs to capture current screen or region for some work where the picture tells a thousand words. In such situation a screen capture utility can be very helpful in taking the entire screen or part of the screen and save it as a picture to attach or to paste it in the word draft or email.

One of the best screen capturing tools, is TechSmith’s “SnagIt” which is very advanced and has all the features you will love. But this doesn’t come free. On other hand if you would need to do some basic work like just capturing part of the screen and doing some editing like adding text or arrow then you can go for free screen capture tool. If you Google it you will find plenty of screen capturing utilities. However some have limited features or we don’t know can bring any spyware in our system also.

Recently I came across one good tool which is not only “FREE” but also “Open Source” and published under GPL. This is called Greenshot. As per their license it can be used as free of charge even in commercial environment as well as in personal or business use. This sounds so exciting, right? Let’s dig into more.

Features:

• It helps to take complete or partial screen shot
• It has hot key to know when to take the screen shot
• Captured screenshot can be saved as file or can be copied to clipboard to paste in email or document which is very handy to use.
• The captured screen shot can be sent to printer to print as well as can be used as an attachment in email.
• It hides in the task-bar and so never interferes with your work. Only comes up if you have pressed the hot key or click on it in the task bar.
• Lightweight to download and takes very less disc space.

Editing Feature- After capturing the screen or part of the screen you can edit the image before sending it or pasting in email. The editing feature is very powerful and can allow you to write anything in any available fonts in bold, italic and with shadow effect.


The have arrow pointer as well so you can point some specific area with it. You can highlight by drawing the rectangle box or ellipse.

 Cons-

• Can not record video.
• Editing feature should have more options like erase, spraying colors etc.
• Automatic updates not available (I couldn’t find it).

Conclusion- If you consider the price and the other features you are getting you can ignore the cons and can continue using it. I have been using it for a long time and is very satisfied. I would recommend it. However if you are looking for very advanced features and options then I would recommend buying SnagIt or other tool available in the market. But this application does its job very decently.

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