Choosing a screenshot grabber...

I am not a professional in this area. I don't plan on spending $50. In fact, I don't spent on spending more than $5 and I'll be a little disappointed if it's not free...

But I do find myself increasingly teaching people how to do things on the computer and a good screen-grabber is REALLY convenient for that!

I've been using skitch since when it was still an EverNote product. I really like its simplicity and its price, but it's maybe just a little too simple...  Here's what I don't like about Skitch:

• Only one style arrow (although I do like that one style - very aesthetically pleasing, but it gets boring after a while)
• Can only keep one screenshot onscreen so not easy to go back to a previous one (yes, you can save it and re-open it, but I'm looking for a list of thumbnails to click on or at least a most-recently-used list)
• Every time you grab a new screenshot you have to go through a dialog to discard the existing one. That really slows me down when I'm in the midst of grabbing a bunch of screenshots to describe a process.
• Some screenshots require a delay because you have to get the screen ready (context menus, etc.). Skitch does not support this capability.
• And the biggie: NO WAY TO CHANGE FONT SIZE ON TEXT

Now I've been pretty pleased with Skitch. By using some "snipping tool" (built into windows) and some clipmate (separate product but has basic screen grab capabilities) I've been able to do most of what I want. This post is seeing if there's not something better out there.  So let's dive in.

Screenshot Captor

I really wanted to like this one. I'm a bit of a geek and this strikes me as a geek's kind of tool. I like the donation-ware model.

But I just couldn't get around the lack of aesthetics. Take a look at this arrow:

 

Now I'm the last person who should be complaining about aesthetics, but it's just ... boring! And that's after messing with it a little bit - the out-of-the-box arrow was unthinkable!

Here's what I was getting out-of-the-box with Skitch:

 

I don't know - that's just nice looking. And the arrow is my #1 go-to when explaining things.

Text can have the font adjusted, but it's all-or-nothing within a single box. I'd really like to be able to say "STEP 1" with the number quite a bit larger (on the next line) than the letters in the same box. The blurring is very well done and the capturing of scrolling areas is really cool. But they lost me on their boring arrow. Sorry.

Greenshot

Hmmm... The arrow is better, but still not measuring up to Skitch. Check it out here:

 

Maybe I've just fallen in love with that pretty arrow from Skitch.  Maybe I need to get over that...

The actual editing feels a little awkward right now whereas editing in Skitch feels as natural as breathing, but I can't compare it to a product I've been using for quite a while. Something about needing to switch back to the select tool is slowing me down, but maybe I'll get used to that.  OOOH, I see it has hot-keys for all the tools, including ESC for going back to the select tool - that's going to start feeling like vim pretty soon, so that's all good. The export to MS Office is a cute tool (although it doesn't seem to work going to OneNote).

The download size is miniscule - barely over a megabyte! How do they do all this in such a small program?!

It doesn't support multiple fonts within a single text-box, but other than that I'm not finding a whole lot not to love about greenshot... (Exception being made for my little thing I've got for that Skitch arrow.)

SnapDraw

First impression - 16 megabytes of download. After Greenshot (which felt like a hamster) it feels like I've just stumbled over a brontosaurus! But size of download is pretty much a non-issue these days so I won't make a deal out of it. (Although I'm still waiting for the download. Ho, hum, twiddle-my-thumbs...)

Ooooo... Aaaaaahhhh...  That's nice!  All my concerns about arrows and aesthetics? Look at this choice of arrows in a library of arrows:

 

And the editor seems amazingly powerful -- all kinds of effects and stuff. Yes, it'll take a bit more effort just because I have so many more choices, but I could really get into this.

HOWEVER, this program seems to be TERRIBLE at actually grabbing a screenshot! It's got all these modes, but what I do 90% of the time is select a region of the screen that *I* choose. And I can't figure out how to make SnapDraw do that! I'm banging my head on it for going on 10 minutes and no such luck... 

OK, I've submitted it to them as a support issue. We'll see what they say. They use a different type of screen-grabbing approach than the other programs I'm used to, but I could get used to it except for this lack of a region-grab capability.

I'll go ahead and post this for now and get back to it if they get back to me.