Screenshots are required by all the bloggers for giving the pictorial demonstration of what they intend to say. Screen shots are also required by the students for their projects and by the computer tutors and many others in general. There are many paid and free screen capturing utilities available on the internet. Here are 21 free Screen capturing utilities for your PC that will make screen capturing really easy for you.
1. PicPick
PicPick is a user friendly utility for capturing the screen shots which is suitable for the most of the users. The screen shot can be saved to a file, copied to a clipboard or can be edited by sending it to the PicPick editor. The extra functionalities of Picpick include color picker, screen ruler, protractor, crosshair, whiteboard, etc. The image editor included with PicPick sports an Office 2007/2010 like ribbon interface and supports tabs so you can edit multiple screenshot images / photographs from the same window
2. ScreenSnapr
ScreenSnapr is a light wieight screen capturing utility that lets you capture the screen and also allows you to upload or share the screenshot. You can also specify a folder on your own server and images would automatically be uploaded to that folder. To share with others, it gives you the shortened URL that you can use to share the screenshot with you friends.
3. EasyCapture
Easy capture snaps full screen, active windows, control objects, fixed size or selected regions. It has a tabbed image viewer and editor, allowing for cropping, resizing, text annotations, arrows, stamps, highlights and other drawing tools, and saving images in various formats.
4. Windows 7 Snipping tool :
It is an inbuilt tool that is under the Accessories menu if you are using Windows7 operating system. It is nice little application that can capture full-screen, region, window or a free hand capture. After capturing the screenshot you can edit it with the editor that opens right after you have captured the screenshot.
5. ScreenPresso
Screenpresso is another freeware application that allows you to take screenshots of part of your screen, a specific window, or the whole screen with a shortcut key, then lets you edit, add effects, and even share with email or Twitter. Screenpresso can guess the region you are trying to capture based on the position of your mouse, allowing you to capture just the content area of an application with a single click.
6. BugShooting
Bugshooting is a freeware utility to take snapshots of the screen with ease. The application allows for taking full screen, rectangular region and multiple screens, but it has no detection of window objects. The inbuilt editor allows you to crop, resize, add text to the snapshot.
7. ZScreen
ZScreen helps you to capture screenshots, text, and files and share them across some of the most popular image, text, and file sharing services. After taking the screenshot you can either save it to your computer or upload it to over a two dozen file sharing services such as FlickR, ImageShack, Tinypic etc.
8. Screenshot Captor
Screenshot Captor can capture desktop, multi-monitor, region, windows and objects with delayed captures. It also has the option to capture the scrolling windows. After capturing the screenshot you can modify the image with the inbuilt editor that can resize, add text, border, frame, arrows etc.
9. Cropper
Cropper is another free and useful screen capture utility for Windows. It makes it fast and easy to grab any part of your screen. The outpur is available in JPEG, BMP & PNG formats. You can use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor.
10. Greenshot
Greenshot snaps a region, window and full screen from hotkeys and the tray icon. It comes with a simple but useful image editor. The screenshot can be saved in either JPEG, PNG, GIF or BMP using a customized naming scheme.
11 Snippy
Snippy allows you take a screen shot of only that area of the screen in which you are interested. Click on the Snippy icon – mouse cursor changes to a pen – mark an area of the screen – the marked area is automatically converted into an image and copied to your clipboard.
12 Lightshot
Lightshot is another free tool for screen capture which features in three different modes- Firefox Add-on, IE Add-on and also as a desktop application. One of the best features of LightShot is that you can instantly share screenshots with your friends or to social networks as this tool uploads the screenshots and provides you with an URL of the uploaded image.
13. Screenhunter
Screenhunter is another tool for capturing screenshots and it also allows you to capture the screenshots from a movie, video, DOS program, DirectX and Screensaver. The screenshots can be taken in various shpaes such as rectangle, ellipse, polygonal etc. It has the options to delay the capture, recur the capture, auto-email and auto scale.
14. LightScreen
LightScreen is a simple tool to automate the tedious process of saving and cataloging screenshots, it operates as a hidden background process that is invoked with one (or multiple) hotkeys. It has the options to save the images in different formats such as JPEG, GIF, PNG etc and delayed captures.
15.Free Game Capture
Games Capture, as the name suggests, it is a tool for capturing the screenshots of the PC games. It records games of high-Def 3D, 2D direct draw or changes of the desktop to various video files in any FPS. It can also do desktop capture (Windows, rectangle and screen)
16. Jing
Jing is both a screen capturing and screen recording tool. It auto detects the objects and windows that need to be captured and after capturing, it allows you to share them with friends or simply save them on the computer. It currently offers to save the file in png format only.
17. Social Screen Capture
Social Screen Capture is a utility to capture screenshots and to upload them onto the image file sharing services such as Flickr and Picasa. It has a simple and easy to use interface that lets you capture the screen in few clicks.
18. Snapshot
Snapshot is light-weight yet powerful utility for capturing screenshots. It allows you to capture windows, regions and objects and the images can be saved in various formats such as JPEG, BMP, GIF,PCX, PNG, PSD, and TIFF.It also supports multiple monitors and Dualview screen captures.
19. 7Capture
7Capture is a fast and easy high quality screen capture software for Windows 7, Vista and XP.It allows you take screenshots and then save them in JPEG,BMP and PNG formats. 7capture automatically handles complicated transparency problems such as rounded corners and Aero semi-transparent windows backgrounds.
20. Speedshot
Speedshot is yet another screen capture utility to capture the screenshots. It provides features to select the file name of the screenshot and also to date to the file name. You can also set hot keys for screen capture. It can capture window contents, desktop or region.
21. Shutter
Shutter is a feature-rich screenshot program. You can take a screenshot of a specific area, window, your whole screen, or even of a website – apply different effects to it, draw on it to highlight points, and then upload to an image hosting site, all within one window.
I have listed here only 21 free screen capture tools, if you know more, and which is your favorite free tool for taking screenshots, you can share with us in the comments.
