ksnip

ksnip is a small and practical, cross-platform tool that allows anyone to effortlessly take screenshots and enhance them with the help of its various annotation features.

The application allows users to capture screenshots in four main ways. Users can manually select any rectangular area (drawn with the mouse cursor), capture the full-screen area (of all monitors) or only the current monitor, as well as the active window.

Once the screenshot is taken, users are presented with an expanded GUI with all the bits and bobs. Starting from the top, the app’s GUI is comprised out of a typical menu bar, a toolbar with the screenshot capturing modes, including a customizable capture delay mode, the actual screenshot display area, and a left-sided toolbar.

From the tool menu on the left, users can add a wide range of arrows to their screenshots, as well as numbers, text, blur effects, rectangles, ellipses, as well as customize various features of these elements such as size, color, and so forth.

Images can be saved as PNG, GIF, or JPG. What’s more, from the Settings menu, users can also choose the default location, filename and format for saving screenshots. The application can even save the screenshots to any default location automatically. Other useful configuration options include the possibility of automatically copying the screenshot to the clipboard, of including the mouse cursor in the screenshot, and of uploading screenshots directly to Imgur.com either anonymously or using an existing account.

To sum up, despite ksnip’s pretty basic GUI, the app provides a surprising amount of very useful tools. What’s even better is the fact that it’s designed to be as accessible as possible making it a very good tool for beginners. It boasts numerous annotation tools, a user-friendly GUI, an auto-saving feature, a well-thought-out Settings section, and it’s capable of saving screenshots in three of the most popular formats out there.

On the downside, it has no support for watermarking, and more importantly, it’s mouse operated-only (no hotkey support). Watermarking may not be a must-have feature, but hotkey support is very necessary for an application such as this as it would help make the whole process a lot more streamlined.