James

Four free ways for Windows users to capture screen shots.

The ability to capture screen shots has been available to us for years through many ways and means. As computer and web technologies advanced the ways and means has advanced as well. The days of hitting the “Prnt Scrn” button and pasting into Microsoft Paint are about as limited as the Pentium I processor.  Nowadays we have browser plugins for capturing full web pages and we have software programs with many advanced features available for capturing screen shots. In fact it evolved into something more, video capture has been around for a while now as well. That’s another story for another time though.

The plugins and software mentioned are all free for anyone to download, install, and use.

Plugins are the way to go if you want a screen shot of a web page. They install themselves and provide you with a way to snap screen shots with the click of a button, it doesn’t get much easier than that. One of the main advantages of using a browser plugin for capturing web pages is that the taskbar and browser are excluded from the image generated. More web page and less of what is unnecessary.

For capturing screen shots of your desktop or programs you’ll need software that runs on your machine. You can always ask Google to discover plenty of options.

Windows Users

Plugin – Firefox Only
1.) I’ve been using Page Saver, a Firefox plugin from Pearl Cresent which allows me to snap full web pages or the visible portion. The only save options are format type which are PNG and JPEG. It doesn’t offer much in terms of features but it’s quick and easy which is sometimes all I need.

Plugin – Firefox and Internet Explorer
2.) A plugin available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer is FireShot. FireShot is a extension for Firefox and Internet Explorer that captures, edits, annotates, organizes, exports and prints screenshots of your web pages.

Software – Vista Users
3.) Use Snipping Tool to capture screen shots – Windows Vista Help

Software – Windows Users
4.) A lot of features, extras, and save options…MWSnap 3 is another favorite of mine, a free gem that I’ve been using for quite a while.
* 5 snapping modes.
* Support for BMP, JPG, TIFF, PNG and GIF formats, with selected color depth and quality settings.
* System-wide hotkeys.
* Clipboard copy/paste.
* Printing.
* Auto-saving, auto-printing.
* Auto-start with Windows.
* Minimizing to system tray.
* An auto-extending list of fixed sizes, perfect for snapping images for icons and glyphs.
* A zoom tool for magnifying selected parts of the screen.
* A ruler tool for measuring screen objects lengths.
* A color picker showing screen colors with separated RGB parts.
* Fast picture viewer.
* Adding frames and mouse pointer images.
* Multilevel configurable undo and redo.
* Multilingual versions.
* Configurable user interface.
* And more…