The best windows capture screen tools

The best windows capture screen tools

The best windows capture screen tools

Windows has about a billion screen capture tools (give or take), but we dig PicPicks huge list of options, built-in photo editor, ability to upload photos to FTP, and its $0 price tag.

PicPick

Platform: Windows
Price: Free
Download Page

Features

• Take screenshots of your entire screen, the active window, a region, and more
• Set up tons of customizable hotkeys
• Annotate your screenshots with arrows, text, and more using PicPicks built-in, ribbon-style editor
• Crop, resize, and rotate images
• Add effects like blur, sharpen, color balance, and more
• Magnify your screen as you take your screenshots for increased precision
• Upload images to an FTP server after snapping
• Much more

Skitch is our favorite for OS X, and now that its finally available on Windows, its one of PicPicks top competition. However, we love Skitch for different reasons: its incredibly simple rather than feature-filled. Just snap a screenshot, annotate it, and save it to Evernote or save it as an image. Its missing a lot of PicPicks customizability, which is why it didnt make our top slot—but its annotation is much easier and prettier, so if thats what youre after, Skitch is a good choice. I personally use a combination of Skitch and Lightscreen (see below) to get the best of both worlds: Lightscreen for fast and customizable screenshots, and Skitch for easy, pretty annotations.

Snagit is about the most full-featured, well put together screenshot tool you can ask for, but it costs a whopping $50. Unless youre need it in a professional environment, $50 is a ludicrous amount for a screenshot tool, so we couldnt bring ourselves to put it up as the best. But, if youre just going by features and and the looks of the final product, Snagit takes the cake.

Jing, from the makers of Snagit, is also very popular. Its similar to PickPic, but with a better sharing feature thatll send your image to Flickr, Twitter, or Facebook. It also does screencasts, which is a nice addition, but it also makes the program pretty slow—which is annoying as heck when all you want is a quick screenshot. I also wasnt a fan of the way its text annotationrequired a white box around all your text.

Greenshot is a slightly less feature-filled, yet similar app to PickPic. We mention it because its popular, but we dont see any advantage to using it over PickPic. Still, if you dont like PickPic for whatever reason, Greenshot is one of the most similar apps youll find for free.

FastStone Capture is a $20 program that brings a few extra features to your screenshots, like sending them in a Word or PowerPoint presentation, screencasting, and more formats. It isnt better than PickPic enough to warrant the $20 price tag in our opinion, but its a good alternative (with a free trial available) if PickPic isnt for you.

Lastly, if all you want is basic screenshot taking, you can try Windows built-in Snipping Toolor the slightly more feature-filled Lightscreen. Snipping Tool lets you capture screenshots and thats it, while Lightscreen offers a delay before taking, the ability to choose your format and save location, and a few other basic features. Lightscreen is very lightweight, which is nice, so if you dont need features like a built-in editor, its a great tool to try.

Many of you undoubtedly have your own favorite screenshot tool, so if we didnt mention it here, tell us about it in the comments.

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