Why this app doesn’t show up on every “top Windows freeware” list, I’ll never know. MWSnap has been around forever, and even though it hasn’t been updated since 2002 it still works perfectly in Windows XP all the way through to Windows 10. You have a choice to to save your images in all of the most popular image formats: BMP, JPG, TIFF, PNG and GIF. You can specify the color depth and customize the quality settings – among dozens of other features. This “part tutorial, part overview” will get you started using MWSnap in no time.
First up, download and install MWSnap. Install is a bit misleading – you just unzip the file and then run it – so you may want to unzip it to a permanent location – like your Program Files folder, and then make a shortcut to it.
- When you start MWSnap for the first time, you’ll be prompted to specify which language you want to use. Make your selection and then click Ok.
- The main MWSnap window will appear. Hover your mouse over the items in the Toolbar to become familiar with some of the options and settings. For the sake of this tutorial I’ll show you how to take a screenshot of a “window” – which can be any open program or item that takes up space on your screen (the Task Bar, System Tray etc). Select Window/menu as the Snap type, and then click Snap window/menu.
- Move your cursor over all of the open ‘windows’ on your screen. Notice that when you pick a certain program or item, it will be highlighted in red. The highlighted section indicates what you’ll be taking a screenshot of, if you click your left mouse button. Once you’ve found something you want to take a screenshot of – click your left mouse button.
- The screenshot you just took will appear in MWSpan’s “preview” window. From here you can save the file, add a frame to it, add a cursor to somewhere on the screen, flip/rotate etc.
- From the MWSnap menu, select Tools and then Hotkeys. Here you can customize exactly how you want your screenshot (MWSnap) hotkeys to be. Once you learn them, you’ll have MWSnap minimized to the System Tray and taking screenshots will become second nature to you.
- Select Edit and then Add cursor. Note the whole slew of cursors you can add to your screenshots. All you have to do is select one, and then click inside the ‘preview’ window where you want the cursor to appear.
- To check out some of the MWSnap settings, select Tools and then Settings. The General tab allows you to set things like autostarting with Windows, display settings for the MWSnap icon in your system tray, and various warnings.
- Select the Auto-saving tab. Here you can specific what format you want the screenshot to be automatically saved as (hint: change from the default of bmp), the default auto-save folder (hint: change from your C:\Program Files\MWSnap to something more easily accessible).
You can also change the default file name for each auto-saved screenshot, add numeric suffix’s (so that each file has a unique name) etc.
- Select the Fixed sizes tab. This is a new one to me, I’ve never had a need to create a series of screenshots based on a fixed size, but I can think of a few pretty good uses already. Anyway – here you can customize or create new “fixed size” regions to use in MWSnap.
- Play around with it a bit to discover even more features and settings.
Seems to be a great app.
Thanks for the heads up!