SnapShot

SnapShot is a small freeware screen capture tool for Windows by David De Groot (Bluefive software). It grabs the whole desktop, the active window or a rectangular part of the screen and saves the result as an image file, without any complicated setup, accounts or online services. The About window of version 1.0.6 shows a copyright notice for 1997-2023.

With SnapShot, you can take screenshots of your desktop or applications quickly with global hotkeys. By default Ctrl+Shift+F captures the full screen, Ctrl+W the active window and Ctrl+R a rectangle selected with the mouse, and every key combination can be changed in the Preferences window. Captures can also be started from the Capture menu of the main window.

Screenshots can be saved in BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, PNG, PSD and TIFF formats. SnapShot can save every capture automatically and generate a file name for it, so a whole series of screenshots is stored without extra dialogs. The mouse pointer can be included in the image, and a sound can be played after each capture.

SnapShot captures screenshots with a single hotkey and sends them to a file, the clipboard, an image editor, e-mail or an FTP server.

The output does not have to be a file. A capture can be copied to the clipboard, sent to the printer, opened in Paint or in your favorite image editing program for cropping and annotation, or sent as an e-mail attachment through the built-in e-mail engine, which also supports Exchange Server.

SnapShot also includes a built-in FTP engine, so screenshots can be uploaded directly to a web server, which is handy for sharing images on a website or forum. The Preferences window has separate tabs for general options, saving and editing, and miscellaneous settings. Saved screenshots are ordinary image files, so they can later be viewed and organized in any photo manager such as Picasa. Typical uses include documenting software, writing tutorials and reporting bugs.

The program can start minimized, hide in the system tray instead of the taskbar, stay minimized after capturing or stay on top of other windows. It supports multiple monitors and Dualview setups, and it is very light on system resources: the program file is well under one megabyte.

Overall, SnapShot is a simple, no-nonsense tool for quickly capturing and saving screenshots. It is freeware that can be used and distributed freely and runs on Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 10. It has no drawing tools of its own, so editing is done in an external editor, and the author's website is no longer reachable.