Scrnli for Chrome

It is almost impossible not to stumble upon something interesting while navigating on the Internet, something that is worth sharing with others. While you could easily share the URL, sharing a screenshot with additional explanations or even a recorded clip might surely come in handy sometimes.

Also available as a standalone application for Windows, Scrnli is a browser extension that adds screen capture and recording functionality to Google Chrome. In other words, you will be able to take snapshots of the browser window or sections of it and initiate desktop and application recording directly from the browser.

Scrnli for Chrome is easily installed in Chrome and a new button is added to the Extensions section. If this add-on is of interest to you, then it is advisable to pin it, so that it is easily accessible whenever you need to take a snapshot or start screen recording.

But what can you capture with Scrnli for Chrome? Interestingly, this add-on can take screenshots of the visible page section, the entire page (even if not visible in Chrome’s window) or a selected area. The browser window and the entire screen can also be captured.

One of the subsequent options in Scrnli for Chrome allows you to download a snapshot of the entire page in PNG format and save it on your computer.

Scrnli for Chrome brings to the table annotation tools that allow you to edit screenshots. As such, you can freely draw onto the image, draw geometrical shapes and explanatory arrows, insert text boxes, crop the image and blur unwanted sections. Moreover, the picture can be rotated with a click.

Once editing is done, you can download the image in PNG or PDF format, copied to the clipboard or uploaded to Scrnli’s servers for easier sharing.

Screen recording is also possible with Scrnli for Chrome. You can use it to record the browser window, the entire desktop or a specific application, Chrome included.

While the recorder is active, Scrnli runs the timer and opens up the built-in annotation tools. A few extra buttons are displayed in the browser window, allowing to pause the recording and use a colored pencil to freely make annotations. This allows you to easily create tutorials for web apps, for instance.

Once the video is recorded, you can download it in WEBM format or automatically convert it to more popular formats, such as MP4, MOV, AVI, 3GP, to name a few. Not that the maximum size of the video should not exceed 500MB.

Despite being a simple browser add-on, Scrnli brings to Google Chrome the functionality of a full-featured, standalone screen capture application or even two or more, if you think that it can also annotate images and record videos of the screen activity.

Not just that it allows you to take screenshots and record the activity inside the browser window, but it also goes beyond its “add-on” status and makes it possible to record the whole screen activity. To my surprise, it cannot take a screenshot of the entire screen or of other applications, but it can record them in a video.