At least three times a week, I get an email asking what software I use to capture the screenshots I post here. I have been using TechSmith SnagIT since version 6.0 and have never looked back. Techsmith just released version 8.0 and it is even better than ever now!
SnagIt offers you the ability to capture screenshots with a variety of different formats including full screen, active window, fixed region and scrolling window. It also installs a toolbar button in IE to allow you to easily capture a web page and with the scrolling window option, that includes the entire page, not just what is on screen. SnagIt 8 also captures hyperlinks on the page and makes them clickable when you save the capture to MHT, PDF or SWF. That is right, aside from graphics formats like JPG, GIF, PNG etc..., SnagIt also allows you to output directly to PDF, MHT or SWF. SnagIt also includes a pretty powerful image editor. It is by no means a Photoshop or Fireworks replacement, but it is a better alternative to MSPaint for editing images. SnagIt's Image Editor has been upgraded and adds vector editing; anything that you add to the capture, such as callouts, arrows, text etc..., can be edited again at a later time.
Techsmith has also added a new feature called the Hotspot. The hotspot feature allows you to capture an image, and then add mouse overs, or on-click functions that you can use to add interactivity to the pictures. Another feature I love, is the ability to print directly to PDF, saving me a few steps in having to save the image and then print it with a seperate PDF printer. A few other things you can do with SnagIt includes batch image conversions, posting to IM, E-Mail and/or FTP directly from the application and video capture.
There is also a timer feature to take screenshots at specified intervals and save them to the location of your choice. You can also create customized capture profiles and specify seperate hotkeys for each profile allowing you to capture different types of data quickly and easily. SnagIt also integrates into Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and Adobe FrameMaker, as well as, integrating into any program that supports COM access with the COM Server making it more powerful than ever. SnagIt is an easy to use, full featured, screen capturing application. I use it daily to capture screenshots, webpages and video streams. It just works!
TechSmith SnagIt