Please indulge me for a few minutes. This screed is basically thinking aloud of some thoughts on a new screen capture discovery that I would like to share with you and will become notes for a planned tutorial on making screenshots
First of all why make screenshots?
Take a look at a tutorial I wrote yesterday to help a friend who had trouble finding a file on her computer, so I tried to introduce the principle of using wildcards,so when I did not think she really grasped what I was trying to get her to do to find her missing file
I wrote the folowing tutorial:-
http://www.johnfowles.org.uk/Tutorials/search_wildcards.htm
you will see that to try to clarify the text I included 8 screenshots.
Making screenshots is one of the most common operations I do on my computer, I make them constantly for many purposes including:-
saving details of an online payment or registration on a website
- saving instant messaging conversations
- saving on screen graphics if there is no direct way of saving an image
(sometimes an image is protected to try to prevent you copying
it. but nobody can prevent you making a screenshot of it!)
- making still pictures from videos playing in a media player such as Quicktime or Windows Media Player
- recording details of program etc menus as used in the tutorial above
the list is endless.
I have therefore over the years found and used a variety of screen capture programs
Many people will say wait a minute there is a "PrintScreen" button on my keyboard, so why get a program at all?
PrintScreen certainly allows you to capture everything that you can see on your monitor and places an image of the complete screen on the clipboard from where you can easily paste it into program such as Microsoft Paint and save from that program
or any other program such as Microsoft Word or Wordpad
But you get the whole screen so if you only want a small portion then you would then have to crop it
far easier is to use a screen capture program where you can select an area to capture
I initially used a freeware program called
screenhunter
but at some point it stopped working ,
I then moved onto
Gadwin Printscreen
which you initiate by simply pressing a hotkey, I usually set it to use F6
everyday I check the current offering on http://www.giveawayoftheday.com
and back in 2007 I downloaded a more advanced program called
TNT Screen Capture
and late in 2008 another called Capture It
I was drawn to both of those by an extra feature which allowed you to add text to your screenshot
but I never got around to trying them out, preferring to continue with the simple F6 initiated Gadwin program.
However from time to time I had wanted to capture more of a web page than would fit on one screen without scrolling , even after pressing F11 to remove the header block.A few times I had made multiple screenshots then tried stitching them together in an image editing program.recently I wondered if there was a method of doing this in one go by saving an image of the complete webpage and I googled accordingly and found a Mozilla Firefox "addon' called "screengrab" that does that (and more)
ScreenGrab
Great I thought as I had already installed Firefox in an attempt to overcome problems I was having with Internet Exploder on my old dial up connection
this proved to be very useable as it places a simple and small clickable icon in the task bar tray bottom right
The snag is that if when using Interrnet Explorer I found that I needed a complete webpage screenshot
I then had to copy and paste the website address into Firefox and screengrab from there.
I then found a similar addon for IE called
iewebshot
that is supposed to add an item to the browser's tools drop down menu
when on a webpage
But it is shareware with only 30 days free and then $12.95
Also I only saw the menu addition once and could not remember what the program was called to reinstall it .I therefore googled again and was delighted to find this time the freeware program
Fire Shot
thie free version of this adds an easily seen activation icon to Internet Explorer's header
I have yet to fully investigate all of the program features but two in particular caught my eye:-
Text and Shape tool: allows you to highlight desired fragment using Rectangular or Elliptical shape
although Elliptical might only come with the paid for Pro version
The provisions for adding text to your screenshots are extensive and you can add pointers and other images
(reduced width screenshot to fit on a corfid page)
So I now have in one fell swoop a single FREE application to do all that I could ever require. I think at this point
Any questions??
__________________
"Sir" John Fowles Bt
Honorary Curator Bootleg Museum
(where Sir does not signify that I am a fully benighted Knight just a Bt which signifies a humble Baronet -?? read the wiki!)
I meant no one no harm
Once inside we found a curious moonbeam
Doing dances on the floor
Making screenshots
