Surprisingly the best screen capture tool for websites is none other than Microsoft Edge in Windows 10. What makes Edge the best is with a click on a button, you have the screen captured and a ‘pen’ tool to scribble. Ever wanted to capture the contents of a scrolling window? It'll do that automatically, and even trim the margins for you. Need to capture a screen region of a fixed size? Piece of cake.
OS X already offers a means of capturing screenshots with a few keyboard shortcuts, but if you want to do a little more you have to grab a third-party tool. Of the many available, Skitch is our favorite for its many annotation tools and instant-sharing options.
If you're not familiar with screenshots, read our beginner's guide.
How to Take a Screenshot or Picture of What's On Your Computer Screen
There are a couple of reasons you might want to take a screenshot (a.k.a., screen capture or screen …
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Skitch
Platform: OS X, Windows, iOS, Android
Price: Free (or $10 for Pro)
Download Page
Features
- Take screenshots of specific areas or the entire screen.
- Annotate your screenshots/images.
- Draw on your screenshots/images.
- Resize, crop, flip, and rotate screenshots/images.
- Automatic archival of your screenshots/images for later use.
- Take photos with your built-in webcam.
- Open and save images in many different formats.
- Easily share screenshots/images to Facebook and Twitter.
- Automatically upload your screenshots to the skitch.com web site or to a location of your choice (e.g. Flickr, an FTP server, etc.).
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Where It Excels
Skitch is pretty great. We take a lot of screenshots at Lifehacker, so a good screen capture tool can be invaluable to us. To others it might be less relevant, but seeing as Skitch is free it's a good app to have around even if you only share what's on your screen from time to time. If you need to show tech support a problem on your screen, or your mother where to look for a certain feature in an app, you can take a quick screenshot with Skitch, annotate if necessary, have it automatically upload that screenshot, and leave you with a URL in your clipboard. It's also really handy for designers, because you can make quick notes on images without actually making any destructive edits to that image. You can also use Skitch to mock up changes to live web sites. There are plenty of great uses for the app, and seeing as it costs you nothing it's worth having around even if it is only a semi-regular convenience.
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Where It Falls Short
Skitch initially had issues with a somewhat confusing interface due to the many tools it offered, but recent updates have mostly solved that problem. Sharing tools have improved as well. While we appreciate the changes, some users do not. Reviews on the Mac App Store criticize Skitch for becoming too bloated like it's big brother Evernote. Because Evernote owns Skitch, the it favors the notebook app over everything else. While you can export your creations, Skitch makes it easier to work with the Evernote and that can be a little annoying if you don't want to use them together.
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The Competition
Grab, the built-in Mac OS X service that captures screenshots, might be sufficient for most people. If you're looking to pair an upload service to it, you can just add the great and free Cloud App. It can automatically upload your screenshots after you taking them. You won't get to annotate, draw on, or do anything fancy to them, but you it's a quick and easy way to share everything on your screen without any features you (potentially) don't need.
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Captur (Free) isn't really a full-fledge screenshot tool but adds some extra functionality to the one built-in to Mac OS X. Instead of relying on keyboard shortcuts, you can use Captur to initiate common screenshot tasks from the menubar.
Snagit ($50) was initially only for Windows, and a Lifehacker reader favorite, but now it is available for Mac. It offers a lot of the same functionality as Skitch, yet it costs $50. Why would you pay $50 when you've got an app that does the same thing for free? I don't know.
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Hive Five Winner for Best Screen Capture Tool: Snagit
Screen capture applications are handy tools to have around. Sure a simple Print Screen and paste…
Read more ReadJing (Free) comes from the same people who make Snagit. It's similar, but with fewer features, and focuses on the online and social aspects of sharing your screen. One big advantage it offers is video capture. If you want images and video and don't want to pay for them, plus some pretty good online sharing options, you'll want to give Jing a look.
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LittleSnapper ($40) is a favorite among some, but I've never been able to see how anyone can justify paying $40 for a screenshot tool. To Little Snapper's advantage, it offers a very nice image management tool and integrated web site clipping option. It used to include use of the web app Ember, allowing you to upload anything you snapped or stored in LittleSnapper, but the developers sold Ember to the developers of Cloud App in early 2011. What LittleSnapper offers is, essentially, a pretty good app for organization. Why you'd want to pay $40 to better-organize your screenshots, however, is something I don't entirely understand. (And I say this having used the app for about a month.) Nonetheless, some people do and some people love it. It is a good app, and definitely more attractive. Skitch is just better at the important stuff.
Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.
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No matter which operating system you're using, a good screen capturing application is a must for every savvy user. Such applications are available in different formats viz., browser extensions and standalone applications. Today, we're going to look at some of the best screen capturing applications available for the Mac platform. All these apps are used by a large number of users and are packed with several intuitive features. Depending on your exact requirements, you can choose the best one has the features that you use most while grabbing screenshots on your Mac screen. Try to pick the one that is light, compact and is having the best user interface. I've tested these apps in different ways and found them quite stable, user-friendly and useful. Let's check out these powerful screen capturing applications made for Mac OS X.Lightshot - This app is extremely light and takes the screenshot in just two clicks. One can easily share the captured screenshot with others as it supports quick uploading to the server. It also includes a powerful image editor to quickly enhance the screenshots instantly after capturing them. Soon after capturing the image, you can easily send it to different destinations including email and popular social media platforms. It also includes a powerful image search facility to mine out similar photos. Although it is available as a standalone application, I prefer the browser extension.
Clarify - This is one of the best screen capturing applications for professionals. It includes several good options to handle the captured images. It allows you to easily capture multiple images in a row to create a sequence that can be easily embedded in a document. When it comes to image sharing, it has a wide array of options that includes PDF file, email & direct upload to a DropBox account or the app's own image sharing service. The app's interface is impeccable with user-friendly controls. It also has an image editing module to pimp up the screenshot before saving or sharing.
Voila - This flexible screen capturing tool is loaded with tons of options. It allows you to take a screenshot in different ways when it comes to selecting a region on the screen. Its editing tools are rich in features including customizable speech bubbles and much more. Smart image organizing features that support tagging ensure you can easily find a previously captured image in no time. It can also record videos capturing the screen to prepare tutorials and presentations for the target audience. The interface of this intuitive application is extremely good and easy-to-use.
SnapNDrag - This tool lets you grab screenshots in three different ways. If you take a lot of screen captures, this app can easily organize them into different folders. If required, you can easily share your images on social media as well as via email. Needless to say, every good screenshot application lets images saved in different graphics formats and this one is no different. Power users can also use its batch image renaming feature to quickly change names of screenshots in bulk. Similarly, users can also customize the hotkeys to easily remember the actions associated with this app.
Snapz Pro X - This app has a gorgeous interface you'll love right from the moment you'll start using it on your Mac. This tool lets you record professional grade screen presentations. Apart from saving screen captures in regular image formats, it can also save them in PDF and Photoshop formats and that too with customizable compression levels. You can also apply various visual effects on the captured image to make it look more pleasing to eyes. You can also add watermarks and copyright statements within a captured image quite easily through this powerful application.
CloudApp - This application is ideal for those users who frequently share the captured images on web. It has a handy sharing mechanism that instantly uploads and provides you with a short link to quickly share the captured image on the web. Apart from images, this versatile app can be used to share almost any type of file on the web. You can also customize the handy screen grabbing shortcut to ease the entire image capturing process. Its free plan lets you share large high resolution captured images with a size of up to 10 MB without any glitch across the web.
Screeny -
Best Screen Capture Tools For Mac
This is yet another powerful combo application that can be used both for screenshot capturing as well as for screen video recording. While selecting the region for image capture, you can fine-tune the details about the specific part of the screen that should be included in the capturing process. Its window capture feature lets you easily take a screenshot of an active window selected by you. With a single click, you can also ensure that the captured image is uploaded to your Cloud App account and the associated shortened link is copied to the clipboard. This app is worth giving a try.Snip - This excellent screen capturing app can easily grab screenshots of scrolling windows. This helps you take images of long web pages that are generally not possible with a regular screenshot application. Its retina display support ensures the captured image preserves the sharpness and clarity of the high-resolution display. This app can also capture window regions quite easily with a single click. And through its flexible image editing extension, you can easily add captions, texts, and arrows within the captured image. The interface of this useful app is quite intuitive.
RetinaCapture - This screen capturing app is ideal for web designers who regularly code retina friendly websites for their clients. It is capable of taking both 1x and 2x resolution screen captures for using in retina ready website designs. You can customize the file naming scheme as per your preferences. Once the shots are taken, both the files are automatically saved in a single folder. One can take the screen captures in different file formats as well as can select the region on the screen for a custom capture. This is surely one of the handy apps, web developers must use.
Ondesoft -