5 Apps for Taking Great Screenshots

Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.

This post is part of the “Sunday Tips” series, in which I try and help you make the things you already do and use, better.

Screenshots (images of your computer screen at a given moment) are one of those things I find myself using far more often than I ever would have thought.

They’re great for showing applications I talk about here, they’re great for getting easier customer service for software; they’re even helpful for showing my friends how to do certain things on the computer.

If only I could take a screenshot of me taking a screenshot, to explain how it’s done. I’m pretty sure if I did that, though, the universe would explode. So I’ll just tell you how.

There are a bunch of easy ways to take screenshots, using various applications that you either already have, or should have, on your computer. Here are five I use:

Paint

The great thing about Paint is that it’s already on your computer, and it’s easy to take screenshots with the application. At any given moment, hit the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard (generally nearish to the F10 key), or the equivalent on a Mac. Then, open up Paint, and hit Paste (Control+V). There, you’ll see your screenshot.

You can then manipulate it or edit it as you would any other image, simply and easily. Paint’s not the most fully-featured program, but for basic things like cropping, it’s perfect.

IrfanView

IrfanView is not only a great screenshot tool, it’s a fantastic image editor. For screenshots, though, it’s simple and useful, and the app I use most. Using it works much like Paint, but it has many more available features. You can easily resize your screenshots, edit them, and save them in any of a huge number of formats.

For image viewing, basic editing, and taking screenshots, definitely start with IrfanView. It’s simple, fast, free, and just generally awesome-er than the default Windows program.

Evernote

This one only makes sense if you’re already an Evernote user – but if you are, this is a great feature. If you have a desktop version of Evernote open, and you hit the Print Screen button, you’re able to select a portion of the screen to clip into Evernote. Hit Print Screen again, and you can draw on the image you’re clipping.

When you click the elephant to clip it, the image is automatically stored in your Evernote files. It integrates right away with your Evernote workflow, letting you search the text in the image, or save it as an image to your computer.

The only downside is that, for whatever reason, screenshots from Evernote tend to be enormous in file size. If you’re an Evernote fan, I definitely recommend using it alongside IrfanView to bring your images down to the right size.

ScreenDash

This is a new application, and one that shows huge promise. There’s much more to ScreenDash that just taking screenshots (and those parts cost), but the free screenshot tool is a great one. ScreenDash lets you take, edit, and upload screenshots, all from one lightweight and gorgeous application.

It’s a surprisingly high-powered image editor, letting you do almost any non-ninja editing you could think of. The whole process is easy, and ScreenDash even hosts your images on their servers, saving you tons of bandwidth and time. If any of those features tickle your fancy, ScreenDash is definitely the way to go. The paid application is even more impressive, but for taking screenshots the free version will do you just right.

FireShot

This one’s for Firefox users only, but is great enough to warrant a mention here. Fireshot lets you take a screenshot, either of the window or of your whole browser, toolbars and all, in one click. It comes with an editor and annotator, making for easy additions and subtractions to your image. Then, you can email it, save, host it, copy it, or sent to another application for more high-level editing.

As someone who uses Firefox, does most of my work on the Web, and loves things that save me time, I’m a big fan of Fireshot. The thing I really like is that for most images, I can do everything I need to without leaving Firefox and firing up another application. It’s a big time-saver, and I’m always grateful for time-savers.

How do you take screenshots? What do you use them for?

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