The best app for screen capture in 2019

by Bradley Nice, Content Manager at ClickHelp.com — online documentation tool

Technology vector created by rawpixel.com

I don’t know about you, but I take screenshots or record my screen quite often during my work day. And even at home I take em — quickly show a piece of a website to a friend, show where some element of some app is located and so on. Life would be a pain if we had to rely on Windows’ snipping tool only.

Thanks to the almighty technology and open source software we have plenty of tools we can choose from. But I was to answer a question of which do I consider to be the very best, I’d say… ShareX.

Why sharex? Well, the short version— it turned out to be the most flexible and the most versatile tool out of them all. Now I’d like to support my answer by some evidence.

The screen capture

That is the main reason why I use ShareX — the ease of taking screenshots. And I do that a lot. Only this month I’ve taken about a hundred screenshots (and that’s only at my home laptop).

All you have to do to capture the screen is press PrtScr button on your keyboard. If you want to capture only a part of the screen — Control+PrtScr is your friend. You can choose any region and that will capture only selected area.

In fact, Sharex has helluva lot of options for capturing screen:

Here’s all you want: fullscreen, a single window, custom region, or even text capture (OCR).

Besides screenshot taking, sharex can record gif or videos of your screen using ffmpeg. The only issue I found with recording video is that it’s not really suitable, for example, for gameplay recording in games. You either get a huge video, or a very compressed one. So for that, I suggest sticking to a specialized software like Nvidia Shadowplay or OBS Studio. Other than that, screen

As you can see, the quality of that gif is pretty high, even though I use moderate settings to reduce its size. Ah, yes — the settings. With the screen recording you have acces to all of the most important ffmpeg settings where you can tweak quality settings. But if you’re not that tech savvy, don’t worry — you can leave everything by default and it will work great.

If you want to quickly edit the screenshot you’ve just taken, there’s a built-in image editor. Add steps to your user guide screenshots, highlight areas, add speech bubbles and even emojis (:

The workflow

Other than just letting you record your screen and capture screenshots, ShareX allows you to create your own workflow. You can set up what happens right after you capture a vid/screenshot:

and that’s only a part of the menu

You can choose as many actions as you like, depending on what you need. In the screenshot above, you can see that after capturing I’m copying image to clipboard (so I can immediately paste it somewhere), saving it to file (for future uses) and adding image effects (yes, the rounded corners and the shadow are applied by ShareX automatically, based on my settings).

If I choose to also upload the file (you can select from multiple destinations like Imgur, Flickr and the like), there’s a whole section available with the “After upload tasks”, which includes actions like shortening URL and copying it to clipboard.

The everything else

Wait, what? What else could a screen capture application do? Well, actually, plenty of things… Even on their website it says “ Screen capture, file sharing and productivity tool”. I’m not big on their additional stuff and I don’t use it very often, but it’s still there. There are tools like ruler, dns changer, hash checker and QR code scanner. And that’s not everything. Check out for yourself to see if there’s anything cool.

Actually, what I said about not using these tools is not completely true. There’s one tool that helps me alot with my work — it’s screen color picker. It lets you pick any color from your current screen and copies the hex color code to your clipboard. Super useful!

The end

If you feel overwhelmed by the amount of features that ShareX provides and think that you’d rather use something click-and-ready simle, don’t. You can just install and use it, no configuration needed. Tweaking its default behaviour is very simple, though — just go into the context menu and look through ‘after capture’ and ‘after upload’ tasks. And whenever you feel you need a little bit more customization — you’re welcome in the settings.

Have a nice day!

Bradley Nice,
Content Manager at ClickHelp.com — best online documentation tool for SaaS vendors