Elegant Cropper utility for capturing screen shots

A helpful reader recently pointed me at the handy Cropper screen capture utility for Microsoft Windows.

One of the most time-consuming tasks in creating a post for this blog is capturing small images of UI examples. For certain jobs, Cropper lets me perform this task more quickly than other tools I've used. (SnagIt, for example, has grown somewhat ponderous for my needs.) Cropper's alpha-blended overlay technique for marking the crop boundaries is elegant, and its keyboard support allows you to tweak the position and size of the captured image.

Comments

[schuimpie]

You can use photoshop, (alt) printscreen adobe->file->new->ok->paste->select part of image->crop->save for web (4x4) 70%

probably overkill to use photoshop, but it's 20sec of work.

[Andris]

Have you seen MWSnap? http://www.mirekw.com/winfreeware/mwsnap.html

Haven't needed anything more in 3 years i'm using it.

[Factory]

Hmm I prefer GIMP for taking screen shots, mostly because as soon as I take the shot, the next thing I'll be doing is labelling it so the user will know what bits I'm referring to in the commentry that follows.

[Oliver]

Also have a look at Gadwin Printscreen:
http://gadwin.com/printscreen/

[Max Howell]

Great utility, thanks for the link. I notice however it's yet-another application that uses the notification-area instead of the taskbar for no good reason I can discern. Otherwise it's the perfect way to take shots of particular screen regions. Smart.

[Brian Scott]

Thanks for the link. I've actually been reading your blog for 3 or 4 months now. It was nice to see someone on my start.com page mention Cropper.

Max, I will look at adding an option of taskbar or notification icon in a future, hopefully next, release.

Cropper is still pretty much the app I wrote for my personal use out of need. The current version I am working on includes a lot of the feedback and requests I have recieved over the last few months.