Ultimate Screen Capture Utility for Windows

Most people know this trick in windows:

  • PrintScreen puts a screenshot in your clipboard
  • Alt+PrintScreen puts a screenshot of the active window in the clipboard

From here you can simply paste it into Photoshop, Gimp or MS Paint, manipulate it and save it. Obviously this is a 3 stage process (snapshot, paste, save) which could benefit from automation. There is a wide range of Window applications that try to make this procedure much easier and more efficient. Some of them are really fancy, with tons of features and customizable settings. Some of them are really simple.

Personally I like Screenrip32 the best. If you like fancy applications with cute interfaces, bells and whistles you will probably be disappointed with this tool. It is very simple and bare bones application which has just the right amount of functionality. The GUI is very basic and simple, but reasonably intuitive:

ScreenRip32 Screenshot

It can take snapshots of the screen, active windows, or specific regions of the screen. I usually tend to crop my images to emphasize important information and leave out as much of dead-image space as possible – so that last feature is a life saver for me.

Screenrip32 is not a resident application so it will not react to PrintScreen commands like some of the other tools available on the market. I personally don’t mind that. I generally do not like resident applications that run as a background service. Lately everyone and their mother have an app that runs in the background, and if you keep installing them they have a nasty habit to accumulating, and becoming a big resource sink.

Screenrip32 is different. It comes from the old school of keeping the applications small, and simple. The whole application is contained in a single file that takes up exactly 513Kb of space. It requires no installation and as you imagine the memory footprint is negligible. It starts up almost instantly, and takes screenshots in mere seconds.

If you want to manipulate the snapshots you take, you will need another application for this. Screenrip32 is a single purpose utility. It doesn’t do editing. In fact it does not try to be an application suite, and do everything at once. It does only one thing, but does it well: take screen captures.

[tags]screenshots, screen capture, screen cap, print screen, screenrip32[/tags]

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2 Responses to Ultimate Screen Capture Utility for Windows

  1. Fr3d UNITED KINGDOM Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    It’s a bit too out-of-date for my liking… There’s no PNG support for a start :(

    It also says you can save into ICO files? Why would you ever want to save a screenshot as an icon? :P

    By the way, you mis-spelt the name of the application in your link to it ;)

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  2. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    True, it doesnt do PNG’s, but I’m willing to forgive that considering it’s size, speed and memory footprint.

    I fixed the typo.

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