Newb Tech

1. Hit the PrtScn button on your keyboard to store the desktop in your clipboard
2. Open up Paint
3. Paste the captured image into Paint
4. Use the crop tool to select just what you want. Cut it out and go to File..New to open up new window
5. Paste your cropped image into this window
6. Finally save the image.

Now try doing that a dozen times for your report or documents…

Features

Step 2

The application doesn’t auto-start, so you’ll have to start it yourself. If you had selected the defaults, it will be found in your Start..All Programs.. Fusign&Design.. Cropper folder. To make it start automatically with Windows, simply copy the Cropper shortcut (not folder) into your Startup Menu. Starting the application won’t show anything visible (ie, it doesn’t magically open a window). Instead, you’ll now see a wee icon on your taskbar that looks like a crosshair in a square.

Right clicking on the window will bring up a context menu which you can explore to see the various options and choices. As an example, the Output menu drops down to allow you to choose whether to store the image in a file or the clipboard.

Step 3

In order to choose the default folder of where the screenshots will be stored, right click on the Cropper icon and select Options. The first thing I normally do (because I like to store my data in a drive other than my c: drive) is to choose a new location to store all my screenshots. This is in the Output tab of options. I’ve taken a shot of all the tabs (attached below) to give you an idea of the various options that may be available.

Apart from changing the default folder location, I normally don’t do anything else on these screens. I do however select Jpg as my preferred output by rightclicking on the cropper icon and going to the Output menu and selecting Jpg with quality of 100%.

Step 4

Right, by now you must be asking when we are actually going to capture anything! Well to capture anything is easy! Simply left click on the icon and a magic blue box will appear.

This box is the area which will be captured. It displays the size coordinates on the top left plus you get a context menu if you right click anywhere in it. You can also resize the box by dragging on the corners. Once you are happy with your selection, simply doubleclick in the blue window to take a screenshot of the area.

1. To take a screenshot of the entire screen, hit PrtScn on your keyboard and Cropper will take a snapshot of the entire screen and save the screen in your output folder.
2. To take a screenshot of the currently active application, hit Alt + PrtScn on your keyboard.
3. To take a screenshot of the blue area, simply double click anywhere in the blue area.

Conclusion

In the end, a free product that does a lot of things that most commercially available products do is nothing to sneeze at. Combined with the fact that Cropper has support for Plug-Ins and the source is freely available, its not hard to see why this is a very popular application.

In the end, I have Microsoft Office One Note which supports a similar way of capturing parts of the screen and I would most likely continue using that. But for people who don’t have One Note, this would be a very nice alternative.

Again, as this is a test drive, I’ve only scratched the surface and haven’t gone into Plug-ins etc. The application is quite simple to learn and use and once you’ve gotten used to it, you’ll wonder how you lived without it.

Relevant links