(Originally published in March of 2010 – repeating here the day after Thanksgiving, 2011. Happy Thanksgiving all!)
Scre
enpresso came cross my radar just a week or so ago. It seems they are pretty new to the web because when I went to follow them on Twitter, I was just the 84th follower.
Screenpresso is a screen capture/editing/effects/twitter tool. Oh, and it’s free! It’s a bit like Microsoft’s Snipping Tool—only more feature-rich. After it’s downloaded, it resides in your system tray (I know, another resource drain, but you can turn it off). When you’re ready to get a screen shot, just right click on the icon and you’ll get a menu of items. This is where you choose if you want an entire screenshot or a certain region of a screen. There’s a cool feature called ‘screenshot autoroll’ which stitches together more than one screen-full.
Above is a shot of their main features—let’s take a look at the more advanced features:
- screenshot history – if you don’t want to save your captures, just leave them in the history of Screenpresso. If it’s something you won’t use again, just delete it. If it’s something you’ll use over and over, there’s an option to save it to a folder on your hard drive. It looks like they are saved in a date order and with a .png extension. If you find yourself making a lot of captures, I’d suggest filing them in folders to keep things manageable.
- add effects – here’s where you can add borders, shadows, etc.
- capture scrolling part – this feature lets you capture more than one screen-full using a stitching mechanism. I didn’t try out this feature, but this is pretty cool!
- screenshot to email – this is very nice because all you have to do is have your history open and drag your capture over to your email task bar and it will put it in your email as a .png attachment.
- screenshots to Twitter – pull up your history and you’ll see the twitter bird icon at the bottom of the screen. Click it and you’ll get a popup to sign in to your Twitter account and send it to twitpic and add a message.
- edit/enhance your image – here’s where you can add explanatory text, arrows or other formatting features to highlight an item or feature. Also a nice feature is the blurring tool – great for blocking sensitive/identifying data
Conclusion
Since this is a start-up, they are still working out kinks and probably trying to make everything work. They are working on a Pro version, which will probably be a for-pay service. I see it looks like they will be offering video – but that service isn’t ready just yet.
I liked using it, the features were pretty intuitive and didn’t take too long to catch on. I think Jing is a competitor of theirs (you can read my article on that), and has an advantage because you can video and record what’s on your screen and share it. I’ll still use Microsoft’s Snipping Tool most because I usually don’t have a need to put effects on my snips or save them. Screenpresso is great for full screenshots and being able to point out with text or arrows what you want your reader to see.