14 DAY TRIAL // Just like photos, screenshots can help you immortalize events that occur on your desktop and can be of great assistance in the making of educational material, such as tutorials. If you’re looking for a quick solution to accomplish this with minimum effort, you can find a companion in Charny Screenshot tool, a small utility that provides basic screen capturing methods with assigned hotkeys.
The Print Screen button of the keyboard is where the whole screen capturing idea began and even though it seems like an ancient habit, it’s still very much popular. As simple as it may seem, it’s actually complicated if you start counting the operations you need to perform in order to obtain a clean screenshot. If you want to capture your entire desktop, with all the active windows, pressing the Print Screen button and pasting the clipboard contents into an image editor followed by saving the result should do the trick. On the other hand, if you require a snapshot of the active window or a selection of your desktop, it’s going to take a lot more than three operations to get it done.
This is when you need to start letting go of the old Print Screen button and begin to explore what the market has to offer in this matter. If you want to stick to the simpler, complication-free choices, Charny Screenshot tool is one suggestion. It allows you to capture the whole screen, active windows or specified regions just by pressing predefined hotkeys.
It’s free of charge, doesn’t require installation and all you need to provide is 29 KB of your system space for the archive it comes in. Only this aspect (of size) should be a hint of how simple the application must be and make no mistake, it really is. In fact, only a glance at the main window should suffice for you to comprehend the low level of complications that are coming your way.
The interface looks undescribably basic and, even though by this, it sports the kind of simplicity that makes it very accessible and easy to use, there is such a thing as too simple. The main and only window is free of menus, has all the options in plain sight and it’s divided into four areas. The first section is reserved for configuring the saving options, which include the output image format (PNG, BMP, JPEG, GIF and TIFF), the destination folder and the image name. For the latter, things are interesting enough in case you’re taking screenshots in a row, because the naming process will add a number to the text you’ve entered in this field. That way, if the name you enter is, for instance, ‘Screenshot’, the series of snapshots will be named ‘Screenshot0’, ‘Screenshot1’ and so on. This comes in handy, because, for one thing, it spares you the manual labor of naming them individually and it also makes it easier to establish the order they were taken in.
The next section reveals the three screen capturing methods that the application offers. You can opt for ‘Fullscreen’, if you need an image of your entire desktop, for ‘Active Window’, if you’re interested in a snapshot of the currently focused window and there’s the third choice that allows you to capture a specified region. For all of these, you can pick a hotkey combination out of the available ones to trigger the screen capturing process. It would be great if you could define them yourself, but since that has been left out, you can take your pick from the available options (F1 to F12 and combinations between the Ctrl key and letters).
Other options allow you to hide the main window before the screenshot is taken, to view the screenshot after it has been captured and to copy the snapshot to the clipboard. The Logs section will allow you to see a list of all the shots taken in one session, with the possibility to view or delete them, to copy their path or the image itself to the clipboard.
There is also an option to send the screenshots to ImageShack, but that didn’t work for us, since the application crashed every time we tried using this feature.
It’s also worth mentioning that handling the application is also available from the system tray, where it places a shortcut. From here, you will have access to a narrower set of features, such as the possibility to take a screenshot, to trigger the main window or the Logs manager.
It comes with good support for the output image format and the naming process can prove helpful when dealing with more than a couple of screenshots. The Bad There are a lot of shortcomings that make quite an impressive list and may not leave you with a good impression. The dull interface, the fact that the application doesn’t remember the settings you’ve made between sessions and the poor implementation of the keyboard combinations are the most obvious aspects that should make the center of attention for future developments. Also, when using the Full Screen mode, the software will also capture a small portion of the toolbar, which may inconvenience you if you require precision. The ImageShack uploader was a promising feature, if it actually worked. Other than these visible aspects, there are features that should be seen in software belonging to this category and we did not find them in Charny Screenshot tool. A screen recording feature, scheduled screenshots or a few image editing capabilities are definitely a long shot, considering the state of development the software is now at.
The Good
The Truth
