The Essentials: Taking A Better Screenshot

Screenshots, it’s something you may not think about often but taking a screenshot is an easy way to share content with minimal effort. There are tools that are built into Windows to make sharing a screenshoot easier, primarily Snipping Tool, but it leaves a lot of room for improvement.

In the blogging world, we use screenshots nearly every day for published content; including this one. When it comes to taking a screenshot, there are multiple free tools available and in my pursuit to find a better option than Snipping Tool or PrtScn, ShareX has won the battle to be my application of choice.

There is one simple reason why I use this tool, and I know others can do this too, but ShareX has the most robust options and workflow customization that allow for custom keyboard mapping.

In my past, I used a MacBook Pro and the one thing I miss about dropping that laptop for a Surface is cmd+shift+4. For those not familiar, this built-in tool allows for custom cropping of screenshots and I missed it dearly on Windows, thus the need to find a tool that would replicate this functionality.

On all of my PCs, I have ShareX installed and ctrl+shift+x mapped to open the cropped screenshot tool (ShareX calls this a region screenshot) and then it saves the image to my desktop. You can select where screenshots are saved and if you so choose, have them automatically uploaded to the web.

The best part about this application, unlike some of the others that I tried out, is that it is free.

The robust nature of ShareX is the reason why I have stuck with it; if there is something you don’t like about it, there is a high probability you can customize the setting. Additionally, the tool receives frequent updates and during the last year or so, has become an essential part of my workflow.

Download: ShareX

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