I have somehow managed to avoid using aftermarket, dedicated screen snipping software up until recently. I have happily used Windows’ built in Snipping Tool effectively since discovering it long ago. After a recent bout of troubleshooting a plug-in at work that required multiple rounds of screenshoting repeatedly to document errors and such, Snipping Tool’s biggest flaw finally got to be enough for me.
That flaw is the need to save each shot as you do them. And on top of that, it does not randomize the name so you risk overwriting if you are in a rush or delirious from hours of running the same plug-in over and over. There are a lot of free and paid third-party screen capture apps. Most don’t really address my hang-ups with Snipping Tool satisfactorily. While others are way too heavy and try to do more than I need from screen capture software.
So I really dug into the options and turned up Snip. It is from the Microsoft Garage, so as close to first-party as you are gonna get until they decide to replace Snipping Tool with it. It is really lightweight for all that it does. It’s other functions don’t get in the way from the basic snipping functionality I need. And it automatically caches snips as you go so there is no need to creep through tasks that require a lot of snips. After installation it automatically maps to the Print-Screen key. Pressing Print-Screen freezes your screen and allows you to snip a whole window by just clicking. Or you can select just the area you want with the cross-hair cursor it gives you. It then brings up it’s main window allowing to markup the snip and saving the changes or you can go about your business knowing that it has cached it in its own library for you to deal with later.
I know there is a plethora of these apps out there, but I really like the idea that Snip is first-party. I hope the Windows team eventually sees fit to at least bundle Snip into Windows, if not outright replace Snipping Tool with it.
