- Snipping tool Mac: A snipping tool is a utility tool that was introduced by Windows from Vista and its further versions. It can take still screenshots of an open window or entire screen and then edit that basic image via different options, like cropping, changing background colors, highlighting a.
- But it comes with another screenshot-taking tool, called Grab, and you can think of it as Snipping Tool for Mac. Snipping Tool for Mac: Grab. Grab is a Mac Snipping Tool alternative that makes it possible to take screenshots of your screen and save them as image files.
Windows has about a billion screen capture tools (give or take), but we dig PicPick's huge list of options, built-in photo editor, ability to upload photos to FTP, and its $0 price tag.
Explore 25+ Mac apps like Snipping Tool, all suggested and ranked by the AlternativeTo user community. You can use Snipping Tool to capture a screen shot, or snip, of any object on your screen, and then annotate, save, or share the image.
If you're not familiar with screenshots, read our beginner's guide.
How to Take a Screenshot or Picture of What's On Your Computer Screen
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PicPick
Platform: Windows
Price: Free
Download Page
Price: Free
Download Page
Features
- Take screenshots of your entire screen, the active window, a region, and more
- Set up tons of customizable hotkeys
- Annotate your screenshots with arrows, text, and more using PicPick's built-in, ribbon-style editor
- Crop, resize, and rotate images
- Add effects like blur, sharpen, color balance, and more
- Magnify your screen as you take your screenshots for increased precision
- Upload images to an FTP server after snapping
Where It Excels
PicPick offers you a ton of different options, both for taking screenshots and editing your photos. You can select your screenshot using 7 different methods, each of which can have its own customizable hotkey. You can choose to include the cursor (or not), choose the output type and quality of your screenshots, and choose where they go—including being uploaded to an FTP server of your choice. It also has an easy to use image editor built-in, perfect for annotating your photos with arrows, text, and more. Simply put, it's the most full-featured screenshot tool that you'll find for the low, low price of $0.
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Where It Falls Short
PicPick is far from perfect, however. Its annotations aren't the most attractive on the block (though neither are most Windows programs'), and its image editor has a ton of tiny little annoyances that can get on your nerves after awhile. For example, when you add text to an image, you have to choose its color from a enormous color palette, which isn't the same simple one you use for arrows and other shapes (making matching your colors a pain). It also doesn't remember all your settings for certain shapes, like arrows, so you'll have to choose its shape and add a drop shadow every time you draw one, if you like those settings. Also, after adding text, if you accidentally add a box around the text, you can't remove it. Which is kind of absurd. We also wish you could upload photos to more than just an FTP server, whether that be to services like Flickr or a simple sharer like Skitch's.
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The Competition
Skitch is our favorite for OS X, and now that it's finally available on Windows, it's one of PicPick's top competition. However, we love Skitch for different reasons: it's incredibly simple rather than feature-filled. Just snap a screenshot, annotate it, and save it to Evernote or save it as an image. It's missing a lot of PicPick's customizability, which is why it didn't make our top slot—but it's annotation is much easier and prettier, so if that's what you're after, Skitch is a good choice. I personally use a combination of Skitch and Lightscreen (see below) to get the best of both worlds: Lightscreen for fast and customizable screenshots, and Skitch for easy, pretty annotations.
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Snagit is about the most full-featured, well put together screenshot tool you can ask for, but it costs a whopping $50. Unless you're need it in a professional environment, $50 is a ludicrous amount for a screenshot tool, so we couldn't bring ourselves to put it up as the best. But, if you're just going by features and and the looks of the final product, Snagit takes the cake.
Jing, from the makers of Snagit, is also very popular. It's similar to PickPic, but with a better sharing feature that'll send your image to Flickr, Twitter, or Facebook. It also does screencasts, which is a nice addition, but it also makes the program pretty slow—which is annoying as heck when all you want is a quick screenshot. I also wasn't a fan of the way its text annotation required a white box around all your text.
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Greenshot is a slightly less feature-filled, yet similar app to PickPic. We mention it because it's popular, but we don't see any advantage to using it over PickPic. Still, if you don't like PickPic for whatever reason, Greenshot is one of the most similar apps you'll find for free.
FastStone Capture is a $20 program that brings a few extra features to your screenshots, like sending them in a Word or PowerPoint presentation, screencasting, and more formats. It isn't better than PickPic enough to warrant the $20 price tag in our opinion, but it's a good alternative (with a free trial available) if PickPic isn't for you.
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Lastly, if all you want is basic screenshot taking, you can try Windows' built-in Snipping Tool or the slightly more feature-filled Lightscreen. Snipping Tool lets you capture screenshots and that's it, while Lightscreen offers a delay before taking, the ability to choose your format and save location, and a few other basic features. Lightscreen is very lightweight, which is nice, so if you don't need features like a built-in editor, it's a great tool to try.
Many of you undoubtedly have your own favorite screenshot tool, so if we didn't mention it here, tell us about it in the comments.
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Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.
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Image credit: John Schnobrich on Unsplash
When you need to grab and image of what's on your screen there is no need to use expensive tools when there is free screen capture software that will do the job perfectly. At the most basic end of the scale, you could just hit the Print Screen button paste the contents of you clipboard into your favourite image editor, but there's plenty of free screen capture software that gives you a great deal of control over your screenshots.
Whether you're looking to capture everything you can see on your screen, just a section of it, or you want to grab still from hard-to-capture places such as in games, there is a tool out there for you – there's even one built directly into Windows that you might not know about.
The beauty of free screen capture software is that it can be as simple or advanced as you need. Perhaps you just want to be able to easily annotate your screenshots – not a problem. Or maybe you would like to be able to use a range of keyboard shortcuts to grab different types of screenshot – this is possible too! Take a browse through this roundup of the free screen capture software and see which suits your needs.
Snipping Tool For Mac Free
How do I take screen captures on a Mac?
Snipping Tool Download
We've covered Windows apps almost exclusively here, but don't feel left out if you're using a different operating system. On macOS, there's no need for a separate screenshot tool – you can do everything with keyboard shortcuts. [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[3] captures the whole screen, [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[4] captures a region, and there are many other edge cases described on Apple's support pages.