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TechSmith Snagit - Screen capture on steroids

Written by Marco Conti Saturday, 24 April 2010 10:36

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About a year ago I purchased Snagit from TechSmith to manage my Screen Captures. Until then I had been using either the good old "alt-print screen", the Vista/Win7 Capture utility or, for my Firefox Browser, I used the pro version of Fireshot, an add on for Firefox that ads full page scrolling to your browser's screenshots.

I bought Snagit because one of my Joomla Training students raved so much about it going so far as listing it as her first choice for desert island duty (If I could choose a single program to use on a desert island type thing).

I found uses for Snagit almost immediately but I have to admit that until recently I did not have the time to really get to know the program well. My use of it was limited to little more than the basic zone screenshot (where Snagit allows you to press a key and draw a zone to capture with a cursor).

In fact, I kept using Fireshot for web pages screenshots because at times I did not want to have the screenshot saved in the Snagit editor before pasting it in Photoshop. 
I still use Fireshot Pro (the free version is only slightly less powerful) for a lot of my captures because it's just a tad more immediate and always available in the browser, but in the last two months I made the effort of learning Snagit's more advanced features and I am never going to look back.

What makes Snagit the most powerful screen capture program for Windows (and Mac as soon as it gets out of beta)?

To put it simply, Snagit is a screen capture dream. There is little it can't do and there is little chance that I can cover all its features in a simple article. But I'll try.

Before going into the basics of the program, let me tell you the one feature that absolutely surpasses anything I have used to date: saving screenshots to an FTP account. 
If you write a blog, especially one based on web technologies or software, you'll need a lot of screenshots to illustrate your articles. Usually this means taking the screenshot, edit it, save it to disk and finally upload it to your web server.

Even if you have a streamlined process in place, it's still a multiple step ordeal you have to repeat for each capture. 
Not for Snagit.
Since Snagit allows you to create custom capture profiles and among the multiple "save as" options there is one to save directly on a web server, it makes taking screen captures to include in blogs and articles a piece of cake. In fact, it's this customization power that makes Snagit the powerful screen capture utility it is.

Installing the software

Installing Snagit is as simple as  as any other program. One can add it as a background process or as a stand alone applicaton you launch as needed. I usually prefer to have as few taskbar programs as possible, but I made an exception for Snagit.

The capture screen and the editor

Snagit has two separate but connected enviroments: the capture window, where one can find all the different capture profiles and make custom ones and the Editor Window which is basically an archive and graphic editor to manipulate screen captures.

Using SnagIt

Even a beginner should be able to use SnagIt soon after installing it. Especially if it is installed as a taskbar utility.

It is launched using the same Alt-Print Screen shortcut that activates Windows built in screen capturing software and the default capture profile is, if I recall (mine is now highly customized) a full screen capture.

Once a capture is taken, the editor will display the image and by default it also keeps a certain number of recent screen captures in an easy to use gallery at the bottom of the window.

The editor's interface uses an MS Office style Ribbon instead of traditional menus. I am not sure that's a wise choice because most people still prefer using a menu system. Or at least I have not spoken to anyone raving about the Ribbon making their computing easier.  Nevertheless SnagIt's ribbon is pretty easy to use and no one should havea big problem with using it.

In the Editor the user can do most basic graphic manipulation and add arrows, bursts and text as needed. Techsmith provides plenty of graphic libraries to add to the basic elements. The editor makes it very easy to take captures of a web page, for instance, and add arrows and other elements to illustrate the point one is trying to make.

SnagIt has a pretty good help system that should make learning the editor and the capture screen quite easy.

Customizing your captures and the editor

But the real fun happens when one goes beyond the basics in SnagIt, something only recently I have had a chance to do and I am now very sorry I didn't take the time to learn these advanced features sooner.

SnagIt installs with a number of very useful capture profiles and most users will be happy with them. Here are some of the basic profiles:

• Full screen capture
• Window Capture - where the topmost window is captured
• Region Capture - gives the user a cursor to select the area to capture
• Scrolling Window - Very useful to take full page capture of web sites. It actually scrolls the window for you
• Menu Time Delay - This is very useful to capture drop down menus and it's basically a delay capture profile
• Video capture - Takes a video instead of a static screenshot. This is a low power version of Techsmith's Camtasia and it's actually powerful enough to create quick ScreenCasts. I use this capture to send quick videos to clients for training purposes since it's so easy to take a video and publish them.

In addition, SnagIt can modify these capture profiles in terms of what it's capturing and where it's saving the capture.

For instance a very useful type of capture is one that lets you capture a static web page but keeps the links embedded in the page active. 
Another type of capture instead lets you capture the text in a page so that it can be edited or simply kept as a record. Not many utilities like it can do this.

Saving your capture is also an area where SnagIt shines. By default all captures are saved to the editor and from there they can be saved to disk. But with custom profiles one can choose to bypass the editor completely and save a capture to the clipboard instead. This makes saving and editing a capture in Photoshop very quick.

My favorite feature is the ability to save to a web server. This is also possible from the editor and "save to FTP" is one of the basic "Save as" options in the editor. But using this feature in the editor is constricting since it can only save to a single FTP account.

Instead, with a custom profile it's possible to create, clone and edit different profiles, each saving to a different FTP or web server.

Here is a short video to illustrate how to create your own screen capture profiles.

In conclusion, SnagIt is the most powerful and complete screen capture utility available on any platform. It costs $50.00 ($49.99 to be exact) and for that price it is a deal considering that it also doubles up as a pretty decent image editor. The addition of video capture and custom profiles makes it even more powerful and useful.

At the moment I don't see any free or Open Source alternative even coming closer to the power of SnagIt but if your needs are not as extensive there are options available such as Jing (also made by Techsmith), Wink (reviewed some time ago on this site) and others. But SnagIt is in a class by itself and by far the best tool on the market.

*cc*