Windows users have lots of choice when it comes to taking screenshots. They can use the Print screen and do without software, or install one of the many free or commercial screenshot taking applications. My favorite program for the job until now was MWSnap, a lightweight screen capturing software that is unfortunately not developed anymore by its developer.
Shotty is another free program for Windows. The first release candidate of version 2 has just been released, and it looks like the program could replace MWSnap on my computer system.
Shotty can be used by clicking on the program icon in the Windows system tray, or by pressing the program hotkey to take a screenshot. The program is able to take a screenshot of the desktop, a region on the desktop or a window. Low quality and high quality options are available for the latter.
Each screenshot taken is loaded into a simple image editor automatically. This editor supports adding text annotations to the screenshot, diffusing areas to hide elements, drawing rectangles and adding textmarks to highlight parts of the screenshot and cropping the screenshot. It is then possible to copy the processed screenshot back to the clipboard, save it to the system in formats such as png or jpg, or print the image on a connected printer.
Shotty 2 furthermore supports uploading the screenshot to image hosts. Supported are five image hosts of which one can be selected as the default host. Urls, HTML or BBCode links are displayed directly in the program window after a successful upload.
Image host integration is just one of the features that Shotty offers. The extended settings hold a lot of additional configuration options. It is possible to configure autosave in the program which speeds up the saving by saving to a preconfgured directory. The fastest way of saving screenshots is however to change the default action from Edit to Save in the right-click settings.
Other options include adding a watermark to screenshots, change screenshots when Aero Glass is enabled (like changing color for the screenshot or disabling transparency) and configuring proxy settings which are only important when uploading screenshots to image hosting sites.
Shotty has a lot of potential. It lacks some features that users may need, like the ability to take a screenshot of a scrolling window. The program sometimes does not take screenshots properly. It happened that it added screen contents that were not part of a window to the screenshot so that the screenshot had to be edited before publishing it.
Still, the final version has not been released yet which means the developers have some time left to fix those elements. Shotty itself is available for download at the developer website. The program requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0. (via Beatmasters)
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Didn’t anyone notice that Windows 7 had a native screen capturing program?
Hoi Martin, your link is not working the right link adres is http://shotty.devs-on.net/en/Overview.aspx
thanks, edited.
Thanks for sharing. I’m using MWsnap till today too. Also works portable from my USB-drive. Hmm, with MWsnap it is possible to move the snapping border with the arrow-keys, to finetune the snap. I really like that feature and did not find it in Shotty.
Hi,
Do you know greenshot?
http://getgreenshot.org/
It’s a very good alternative to snagit or snagit-like softwares.
Open source of course <3
I wrote a review on this a while back on my site. But, that’s nit what I’m here to say. The developer commented on my post saying that scrolling screenshots are an unlikely-to-be-added feature as they would break the Aero border.
Try ZScreen, it is waaaay better.