Greenshot

Description

Greenshot is free, open source screenshot software for Microsoft Windows. You can use it to take all kinds of snapshots of your screen (whole screen capture or just a particular region).

Once you have the screenshot, you can edit it, add notes, highlight certain areas or even obfuscate one or more parts. If you're pleased with the result, you can export the screenshot in several image formats, send it to your printer, clipboard, attach to e-mail, upload it to a photo site (e.g. Flickr and others), etc.

This utility is available under the GNU General Public License, and it is available in over 30 different languages (the installer lets you choose which ones to install).

Greenshot Features

This is a list of the most important features of Greenshot, however, a good place to start learning how to use this program is to access the "Greenshot Help" section which is also available in other languages. Read the whole help section (recommended) or only the area you need.

Anyhow, here is the list of the most important features:

• Make a screenshot in multiple ways: capture a region, the last region, a window, full screen or Internet Explorer
• Remove the mouse pointer from your screenshots (you will have to access "Quick preferences" and uncheck "Capture mousepointer")
• Customize the shortcuts for taking a screenshot (access "Preferences/Settings", then "General", and choose other hotkeys)
• Change the export settings (there's a ton of options to choose from: open the capture in Paint, Microsoft Office, copy to clipboard, send it to your printer, open in an image editor, save it as a standard image like PNG, BMP, GIF or JPG, upload to Imgur, etc.)
• Edit screenshots and add arrows, lines, rectangles, change colors, add text (comments)
• Obfuscate one or more parts of your capture (sensitive data such as usernames, bank account, names, passwords, human faces, etc.)

Greenshot Review

When you install Greenshot, depending on which Microsoft Windows OS you use, you might be prompted to install a ".NET Framework". This program is written in the Microsoft .NET Framework so if you don't have the right version installed (for example on Windows 7), you will have to allow the installer to download and install .NET Framework 4.7.2. The installer requires Windows 7 SP1 or later.

I tried several other similar apps such as Snagit, FastStone Capture, Jing and even bought a commercial license for WinSnap. The main difference between Greenshot and all the other commercial alternatives is simple: open source and all the benefits that come with it. Sure, it might not have certain features such as video capture which can be useful but still, new features are being added all the time, bugs and errors are fixed, and the most important thing is that development keeps going on, which is a major issue for most open source projects.

Finally, I can easily recognize a superb piece of software. Greenshot is a free, user-friendly tool for taking and editing screenshots.