Cropper – Capture your Screens easily!
There are many applications out there that can capture all or part of your screens. The more notable ones include SnagIt and via Microsoft Office One Note. Unfortunately most of these cost to use. Cropper has been around for a while now and is one of the best free screen capture applications out there.
Written by Brian Scott and available for both Windows 32bit and 64bit operating system, it offers an easy, intuitive and configurable means to capture ones desktop.
Lets go through its main features first before we take it for a test drive….
- Hit the PrtScn button on your keyboard to store the desktop in your clipboard
- Open up Paint
- Paste the captured image into Paint
- Use the crop tool to select just what you want. Cut it out and go to File..New to open up new window
- Paste your cropped image into this window
- Finally save the image.
Now try doing that a dozen times for your report or documents…
Features
- Cropper is built using Microsoft .Net framework
- Its Open Source and FREE!!
- It can capture the active window, a predefined area, the whole screen and more.
- It supports multiple formats to output the image including the clipboard (so you can simply crop a part of a screen and say, paste directly into Word.
- It can capture transparent windows (used by Vista quite a bit).
- It offers Plug-in support to allow a wide variety of plug-ins to be developed and used to supplement the application functionality
To Install
To install and run Cropper, use the following steps:
Step 1
Go to http://cropper.codeplex.com/ to get to the main download page of Cropper. Click on the Download button to download the application. Installing the application is simply unzipping the contents into a temporary folder and starting up the Setup application. Follow the prompts all the way through to complete the install.
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.
- 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.
- To take a screenshot of the currently active application, hit Alt + PrtScn on your keyboard.
- 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
- http://cropper.codeplex.com/ – source download page
- http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/default.aspx – Brian Scotts (the author) blog.
- http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/articles/Cropper.aspx – Cropper page on Brians blog
2 Comments to Cropper – Capture your Screens easily!
Leave a comment
Recent Posts
- SkyDrive Explorer integrates SkyDrive As A Network Drive
- Capture Screens and Screencasts Easily With Jing
- How to Copy Your iPod/iPhone Music To Your PC with SharePod
- How to Prevent Ads on Windows Live Messenger
- Windows Live Writer Tips: How to Refresh Your Theme
- How To Configure Windows Live Writer for WordPress Blogs
- How To Get IPhone/IPod Working With Windows Server 2003
- How to Add Chrome like New Tab and Home Page to Firefox
- How to Install SkyDrive as a Network Drive via Gladinet (updated)
- How To Search for Icons easily using Icon Finder
- Twitter Theme Finally Updated
- Microsoft Offers Free Online Translation Services
- On A Personal Note…
- 2 Web Based Applications To Manage Multiple Twitter Accounts
- 11 Free Services for Online Storage, Sharing & Collaboration
Categories
- Linux (5)
- News (5)
- Productivity (36)
- Collaboration (4)
- Design (2)
- IPhone (2)
- Microsoft (9)
- Multimedia (3)
- Online Storage (11)
- Remote Connections (3)
- Test Drive Apps (19)
- Twitter (3)
- Web Browsers (4)
- Tutorials (19)
- Tips (10)
- User Experience (8)
- Thoughts (4)
Featured Posts
Views
- Live SkyDrive – How To Set Up As Network Drive via Gladinet - 13,530 views
- ScreenToaster News and Updates - 5,021 views
- How To Get IPhone/IPod Working With Windows Server 2003 - 3,512 views
- How to Add Chrome like New Tab and Home Page to Firefox - 3,119 views
- How to Connect to your Home Machine via Gbridge - 2,793 views
- Vixy.net – Download Videos From YouTube Easily - 2,548 views
- 11 Free Services for Online Storage, Sharing & Collaboration - 2,359 views
- Windows Live SkyDrive – 25 gigs of space for free! - 2,291 views
- 6 Free Mind Mapping Applications for Brainstorming - 2,217 views
- How to Install SkyDrive as a Network Drive via Gladinet (updated) - 2,164 views
Archives
- November 2009 (1)
- October 2009 (1)
- September 2009 (1)
- August 2009 (4)
- June 2009 (2)
- May 2009 (7)
- April 2009 (14)
- March 2009 (13)
[...] the last post we test drove an application called Cropper that takes static screen shots of your desktop (full screen or partial). This time we’ll [...]
[...] while ago, I looked at a screen capture tool that I used for quite some time called Cropper. I’ve recently been introduced to an alternative that has replaced all my screen capture [...]