Free Screen Capture Tools for Webmasters

When creating websites or writing articles for your blog, a common task that comes up is taking a screenshot to capture your screen and save it as an image. Both Windows and Mac OS X provide built in tools to accomplish this task, but neither have all the features many web designers require. In this article we’ll look at several free, screen capture alternatives.

Free, Open Source Screen Capture Software

For Windows users there are a couple of free, open source screen capture options. My personal favorite is Greenshot, which the developers describe as “a free screenshot tool optimized for productivity”. Greenshot is an open-source project and their light-weight screenshot software is completely free. This software is easy to use for creating complete or partial screenshots, and you have the option to send the screenshot to a file, the clipboard, a printer or as an e-mail attachment.

Another popular open source screen capture tool for Windows is ZScreen. ZScreen has a load of features you won’t find in other screen capture programs. Some of these useful features include the ability to: automatically embed watermarks on your captured images, automatically name captured images using a configurable naming convention, upload captured images to an FTP server or public hosting sites (like Flickr, Twitter, Rapidshare, ImageShack, TinyPic, and more), and support for several popular URL shortners including bit.ly and TinyURL.

Lightscreen is a third free, open source tool for capturing screenshots. It has all the standard features like the option to set your own hotkey, ability to startup with Windows, and multiple image formats (PNG, JPEG, etc) with image quality selector. My favorite feature of Lightscreen is the option to enable magnification around the your mouse area. There are many occasions where this magnification feature has been very useful.

Don’t worry if you’re a Mac user, there is a free, open source solution for you as well. CaptureMe is a flexible screen capture and recording utility for Mac OS X which features a floating capture window, several saving options (PNG, JPEG, JPEG 2000, TIFF, or GIF), and the ability to resize screen captures on the fly. CaptureMe was written using Cocoa and OpenGL so it was specifically designed for Mac OS X.

Free Screen Capture Plugins for Your Web Browser

Don’t feel like downloading any software? No problem! A popular choice for screen capturing is to use a plugin for your web browser. This opens up some additional options for the platform you use since these browser extensions will work on PCs, Macs, Linux machines and any other operating system your browser runs on.

For Firefox, one of the most popular screen capture plugin is Screengrab!. Screengrab! is a free, Firefox extension that makes it easy to save a web page as an image. You can select the entire screen or just a small part of it. It even has the ability to captures Flash and Java applets.

For Google Chrome users, the most popular extension is Screen Capture (by Google). This plugin allows you to capture visible content of a tab, a region of a web page, or the whole page as a PNG image. It also support horizontal scrolling for large pages that don’t fit in one tab screen horizontally, and has the ability to share your screenshot to Facebook.

If you use Safari, a good browser extension is Awesome Screenshot. This free extension is also available for Chrome as well (and they say a Firefox version will be released in the near future). Awesome Screenshot includes the option to capture the visible area of your browser, a small selection, or the entire webpage. Some other cool features are the ability to annotate your screenshots with rectangles, circles, arrows, lines and text, as well as the ability to remove sensitive information with a blur tool. This extension also has a share feature where you can upload the image to awesomescreenshot.com and they provide you with a shareable link.

Conclusion

Besides the screen capture tools built into your operating system, there are many other options available to make it easy to take screenshots. Both Windows and Mac OS X have free, open source screen capture tools. You can also find browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari to capture your screen. I’ve included links to some of the best screen capture tools above. If you use any of these tools, or know of additional screen capture resources I missed, please share in the comments section below.