Whether you are a freelancer or a working professional, screenshots have increasingly become a part of work. People who have used Microsoft Windows in the past should be familiar with Snagit. Snagit is a wildly popular screen capture tool developed by TechSmith, the development studio behind the famous screen recording and video capturing tool Camtasia Studio.
While Camtasia has been available for Mac users for a while now, Snagit has recently launched Snagit to compete in the ultra competitive Mac screen capture market. After the break, let’s take a look to see whether it could be your new favourite screen capture app…
Installation & Set Up
Link to Video Walkthrough
Snagit costs $49.95 for a single license, which is a bit higher than competitors such as LitterSnapper. You can download the full-featured 30 day trial version of the app by submitting a valid email address at their homepage.
The installer displays an option to see a video demo of Snagit, and selecting it will open the video walkthrough in your web browser. A quick way to get to grips with the app.
The installation process does not happen in a single like typical Mac apps and, in Windows like fashion, you are asked to agree to the EULA, select a location for installation etc. At the final step, the installer also asks if you would like to install a Firefox plugin for taking screenshots.
Installer
When launched, the app displays a license information screen and a slide out tab on the right side of the screen. This tab can be docked anywhere you like and has a capture button which lets you toggle between all-in-one capture or window capture modes.
Licensing Information Screen
Once initiated, the app launches an intuitive interface that allows you to capture anything on your screen. You can capture the entire screen completely, just the window you have open, the entire content of a very lengthy scrolling page or a single pane with ease.
When you attempt a screenshot, both the dock and the menu bar icon are automatically hidden from view. There are also options to capture images with a time delay (1 to 10 seconds max) and to capture images without the cursor.
Taking a Screenshot
By default, all images captured open in the built-in image editor which lets you manipulate and annotate the images. However, from the settings screen you can choose to save them in the clipboard or save as a file in a folder.
Floating Dock
The Snagit icon in the menu bar has pretty much the same feature set of the dock, except that everything is listed as a drop down menu. From the settings screen you can choose to turn off either the dock, menu bar icon, or both. In case you have both of them turned off, the app can be controlled using the shortcut keys.
Image Editor
Image Editor
The thing I like the most in Snagit is the image editor – it is simple, intuitive and has a great set of annotation and editing tools. The image editor shows all the images captured in the bottom row, and you can select or delete the images at will.
Annotating an image is very important for conveying the point clearly to the viewer. Snagit has a bunch of arrows (bidirectional, dotted, curved), shapes, text boxes, thought bubbles, eraser, color filler and more. Color, opacity and other styling details of annotation elements can also be fine tuned extensively.
With the help of the blur tool, you can hide private data like email address, and credit card information etc. from prying eyes. Effects like a border, shadow and perspective can also be added to your screen capture. If you are someone who is very particular about details, Snagit lets you create custom styles as well.
Just like in Photoshop, with Snagit you can drag a screenshot over an image in the editor to start combining them into one. The images can be edited in layers and it is up to you to add as many effects as required to make them perfect.
Managing Screenshots
Once screenshots are properly formatted and annotated, you can email them right away from the Snagit editor. If you are hosting a blog or website, you can take advantage of FTP option to shoot the files directly to your web server as soon as they are ready.
Want to reach the maximum audience without burning a lot of your server bandwidth? You can upload the images (and videos & documents too) to Screencast.com, run by TechSmith.
After uploading the content to Screencast.com, you have full control over who can access it. Alternatively, you can drag-and-drop the finished images from Snagit straight into your favorite apps, including all iWork and Microsoft Office.
Final Thoughts
As expected, Snagit comes with the same set of features that the Windows version has. Personally, I have had a tough time taking screenshots of drop down menus with the Mac screen capture apps, and hence will often move to my Windows desktop to write app reviews for Web.AppStorm.
However, for a lot of Mac users, free alternatives with a superlative feature set like Skitch are more than enough for taking and managing screenshots. More competitive pricing would have given Snagit an upper hand entering so late into a saturated market.