Take Screenshots of Your Desktop

very good
key review info
application features
  • Captures destkop, active window, components and custom selection
  • (3 more, see all...)

Taking screenshots is not rocket science and Snappy is the living proof of it. It aims to take a stand in its software category, by offering various possibilities to grab the desktop, active windows or specific areas. Add to that a pinch of editing and you’re in for a treat.

With all the software possibilities out there, the standard Print Screen function of Windows is beginning to feel over rated and the need for advanced techniques to grab screenshots is growing by the day. The market is oozing with dedicated utilities, both in free and paid form that can show you a great time when it comes to screen capturing. Most of them will allow you to capture the screen in various forms and formats, but lack editing possibilities. Snappy turns this around and lets you bring a touch of your own imagination into your work.

What’s more, it’s free of charge and weighs a little over 5 MB in size. The installation process is complication free and features an option to make the application portable, which means you will be able to carry it on a removable drive and use it on any computer.

Snappy’s interface has a classic look. It’s not shiny or colorful, but it’s not hard on the eyes either. Perhaps “organized” is the word for it, as most of its functions are concentrated in three menus that make its features more accessible even for beginners. Even though it’s got shortcut buttons to almost every action, until you get used to them, the menu alternative is to be appreciated.

What is great about the main window is that it manages to offer you access to all the screenshots you took so far and allows you to mark them individually for further processing. This can be done from the left panel, where the images are listed as thumbnails, while the middle panel holds the preview of the screenshot. The right panel is the place where editing can be performed and just under it, there’s an area where you can enter additional image data, such as title, description and keys. For when you’ve got a large amount of screenshots, the keys will help you localize images faster, as the application also features a search option.

To sum up, getting accommodated with the interface is pleasant and easy, while capturing screenshots is no tricky business either. You can accomplish this by accessing the “Capture” menu, which displays options for grabbing the desktop, the active window, an object or a selected area. You’ll also find useful that next to each command, the application shows the keyboard shortcut for triggering the associated function. If you’re unsatisfied with the default key combinations, you are welcome to customize them from the Settings window of the application.

A feature that is less common in this type of application is the Event Capture, which translates into recording the screen at mouse or keyboard events. You can set the application to capture the screen for each mouse button individually and you can select the mouse actions to be recorded: clicked, released or double clicked. It’s also possible to restrict it to record when pressing specific keys, of your own choice.

While still in the Capture menu, you can check out the extra two utilities that Snappy incorporates namely the magnifier and the webpage capturer. The magnifier is a screen loupe that provides a zoomed view of the pixels on your desktop and what’s more, it’s accompanied by a color picker that you can use to collect HTML color codes. The webpage capturer, as its name states, is meant for taking screenshots of Internet pages in two modes: the whole page or the current view and while you can still accomplish this with Snappy’s standard screen capturing functions, this utility would be, nonetheless, the easier approach.

Whatever method you choose to grab the screenshots, Snappy complies and lists them neatly in the left panel, so you can play with them a little. Prior to saving the images, you should definitely take a look at the editing functions. These are rich enough to put your imagination to work and comprise customization for the RGB palette and for brightness, contrast and color intensity. Also, a set of basic drawing tools are available for sketching lines, rectangles or ellipses with various pen styles.

The real fun comes out of the more advanced image effects accessible by right-clicking the picture of interest. Among them you will find filters such as: sharpen, Gaussian smooth, mosaic, mono noise, color noise, spray, horizontal and vertical shift, rotate, flip, emboss, curve, twist and invert. Truth be told, it could grow a couple more effects: black & white, mirror or sepia, to name a few.

A note of warning is due here; make sure you apply the filters first and then customize the RGB, brightness, contrast and color. If you do the other way around, the filters will be applied only to the original image and not to the one you modified.

When you’re done playing the artist, the work needs to be saved and you can put to work the functions located in the “Images” menu. The same menu sports possibilities for exporting the screenshots in various formats. Among them there are three of the most popular image types: BMP, JPG and PNG, as well as PDF, XML and AVI.

Exporting to one of the mentioned image formats brings up a dialog where you can customize the file name schema, which is awesome for situations involving a large batch of pictures. If you choose to save them in AVI format, the application makes available options for setting the width and height of the video file, the frame duration, as well as the compression type.

If you’ve performed editing on the snapshots, unfortunately, the export feature won’t take it into consideration and will save the original, unaltered images. Instead, you can make use of the right-click menu and choose the “Save as” item, which is guaranteed to keep the modifications you made to the screenshots.

Another command that you’ll find in this menu allows you to edit the images further more and add objects such as panels, markers, cursors, images and text to them. The result can be saved either as a template, which can be later used on other screenshots or in BMP or JPG format. Aside from image templates, an option for designing PDF templates from scratch is offered by the “Tools” menu, which is also the place that holds a shortcut to the Settings window. It allows you to configure the capture delay, the output folder, the thumbnail size and makes it possible to associate custom commands to user driven captures. In other words, you can enter the commands to be executed on capture; for instance, you can set it to open Paint or Notepad right after capturing a screenshot.


The Good

Snappy turned out to be user friendly and easy to use. It’s not at all stressful on the system resources, taking up only 10 MB of the available RAM, with a negligible impact on the CPU.

It scores high with the event capturing feature and with the rich effects and filters that you can use to spice up the screenshots.

The Bad

An aesthetic problem occurs when capturing the active window. If the window you want to grab is maximized, the application also captures a small portion of the Windows taskbar in the screenshot.

It crashed a couple of times when we made use of the drawing tools. Also, in some of the menus, a few items are displayed in Italian.

The export function saves only the original images, without porting any of the editing operations you might have performed on the screenshots. The Truth

Snappy is not complicated to work with and provides a lot more than the basics needed to capture screenshots at a decent quality. It’s got good support for output formats and is generous enough to let you tune the snapshots in just the right amount. Besides, for a piece of software that comes free of charge, the list of shortcomings is not that long.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action:

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user interface 3
features 4
ease of use 3
pricing / value 4


final rating 4
Editor's review
very good
 
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