If I made a chart of the time I’ve saved from each category of tech tool, tools for screencapture would top the list. You can use these tools to:
- Show people what’s on your screen
- Grab graphics from the web
- Give feedback on documents without typing out all the comments
- Add notes and arrows to maps to make directions better
- And much more!
Jing is by far my favorite tool for capturing screenshots, but many other options rock almost as much.
Skitch, a freebie from Evernote, is my favorite app for on-the-go screenshots and annotations on my iPad. You can annotate a picture from your album, upload a PDF, annotate a screen snap of anything on your device, or capture a shot from the web. Then it’s easy to add notes and share or save. I appreciate the pixelate feature that lets you blur out personal information – or an ex-boyfriend’s face.
Skitch made Beth’s Top Efficiency Tools list!
Watch this short video on how Skitch works:
The Chrome Store has thousands of extensions you can add to your browser to make your life easier, including screenshot tools. After you install them, you can click the button from any webpage to grab a full screen or just a portion – even capture the whole webpage without scrolling.
My favorite Chrome screenshot extension is Webpage Screenshot. It’s free, of course (always something that makes me love a tool more); and besides having all the standard screenshot features I look for, it also lets you edit a webpage before you capture it, meaning you can actually change the text on a published page. It made me a little uneasy to do it to my own site because I feared I was messing up the original page, but it’s actually only a copy.
Another cool tool is called Awesome Screenshot, which has the same types of features plus the capability to create a temporary link so your share doesn’t stay online forever. Awesome Screenshot is available on several browsers and comes from Diigo, a deluxe bookmarking tool.
Check out this quick video review of three screenshot extensions for the Chrome Browser: Pixlr Grabber, Webpage Screenshot and Awesome Screenshot.
For the Mac, Command-Shift-3 for whole screen and Command-Shift-4 for cursor controlled grab. Both can be configured to auto-save to a folder in the format of your choice 😉
Alan, thanks for the bonus tip!