The third and often best possibility is a software that takes screenshots in select intervals automatically.

Auto Screen Shot is a free software for Windows that can be used to do that. The software needs to be installed first before it is ready for usage. You see the following interface when you load the program after installation.

The first thing that you’d probably want to change is the save location for the screenshots. It is set to the root of drive c by default. Users of Windows 7 cannot save files into root by default. I’d create a new folder for the screenshots to make the organization easier. The two other options you have are the interval in which screenshots are taken and the image quality of the saved images.

The default interval is set to 10 seconds. You can change that to a custom minutes:seconds value if you like. The quality is set to 75%, which feels a bit low, especially if the screenshots are used in presentations or published online.

A click on Take screenshot now (Test) creates a single screenshot which you can use to examine the quality setting. A click on Start Capture takes screenshots of the desktop in the selected interval. You need to minimize the program window manually if you do not want it to appear on the desktop.

You stop the automatic screenshot taking with a click on Stop Capture. The button appears after you start the process.

A feature that is missing are hotkeys to start and stop the capture, and to take screenshots manually. All screenshots are stored in the selected directory in the format screenxxxx.jpg.

Auto Screen Shot works in all recent versions of the Windows operating system. You can download the latest version directly from the developer website.

Screenshot Captor by Donation Coder Mouser is another screen capture software and it feels like comparing Wordpad with Microsoft Office Word. Screenshot Captor was recently released in a new version and it provides functions that many users will find attractive and useful.

It obviously supports capturing various parts of the computer screen like program windows, selected regions, fixed sized regions, the entire screen but also scrolling windows and objects which is one of the additions in the new version.

The screen capture software can be managed from the program’s interface or by using hotkeys – which can be changed to preferred key combinations – to speed up the screen capturing process. The process of capturing a screenshot is not slower than capturing a screenshot with MWSnap.

Screenshot Captor shines when it comes to processing a captured screen. MWSnap was only able to save it in various formats while Mouser’s software can add elements to the screen before saving it. It is nevertheless possible to simply save it and use it that way. Users who like to add text, images or objects to screenshots on the other hand will find all the tools they need to do just that.

By default Screenshot Captor displays a small dialog after taking a screenshot that can be used to print or save the image, copy it to the clipboard or create a thumbnail of it plus various other possibilities. That dialog can be disabled in the program’s options but it is quite useful for those users who want to take a screenshot and save it right away with processing it further.

Captured screenshots can be shown in the main program interface where they can be processed. The image can be resized, text can be added, sections of the screen can be highlighted and objects added.

Previous screenshots are shown in the capturing history which provides a fast way of accessing them from the program’s interface. Another interesting option is the support for third party tools. It is easy to integrate them in Screenshot Captor and use them to process the images further.

The homepage links to a few additional tools that can be integrated like a color chooser to discover the exact color of a pixel of the screenshot.

The screen capture software should be the right application for anyone who takes screenshots regularly. Users who process their screenshots afterwards will find all the tools they need to do just that without the need to install an image editor to do so.

Update: Screenshot Captor 3 has been released. I suggest you check out the review linked above to find out what’s new. Among the new features are automatic screenshot uploading options, Windows 7 window transparency support and the best scrolling window capturing options that you find in a screen capturing software.