You'll find Cropper here
Cropper is a great tool by Brian Scott for making snapshots of the screen. Ever since the PrintScrn button at the keyboard failed to send the 80x40 characters to your rattling matrix printer, publishing screen dumps to the world has been the domain for commercial and non commercial tools.
The process from pressing <ALT> <PrintScrn>, the starting of a program like Paint, Fireworks or Photoshop, and saving to you desired bitmap format was either to cumbersome, to slow or didn’t meet functional expectations. I’ve been forced (eh been tempted, eh been pleased) to write a screen dump tool for a specific client or project once in a while.
What I like in a screen dump tool is simplicity and ease of repeating. A screen dump usually is a result in a process, like writing a blog: You show some state with a picture, write about that state, alter the state and make a new screen dump. So the feature to take dumps of the same area is a must.
Also, if I’m taking a series of screen dumps I am working in a certain context. So naming every separate bitmap file is redundant and inefficient. Usually the date/time as prefix will do nicely.
If you opt for simplicity Cropper is the tool you’d want to check out. Output is flexible and extendible because Cropper uses a plug-ins to output the screenshots.
Cropper presents itself as transparent window that can be sized by mouse an keyboard. The position is kept the same between captures, so taking multiple shots from a process is easy. The output that uses files is placed in a configurable folder, and is provided with a configurable name.
Other features are
- Sits in your system tray
- Output of thumbs as well as the original size
- Capture of transparent windows
- User defined sets of sizes
- Using Cropper for <PrintsScr> screen dumps
A few features, I think, are missing:
The option to copy the capture to the clipboard as well as using file output (as a kind of backup).
The option to include the position as well as the size in the user defined list of sizes.
There’s no default output. Forgetting to select one presents the novice user with an exception-like message
But if I really do need these features I can always code them myself: Cropper is an open source C# project!
Think of the possibilities: writing a plug-in for your ticket application (has been done!), creating frames, reflections and shines on your screen dumps …
It’s a nice tool, and I think it’s great it’s open source and extendible!
You'll find Cropper here