Snagit – A Better Screen Clipping Tool
Both Windows and Macs come with screen clipping tools. Windows 10 has Snip and Sketch, Windows 11 has a Snipping Tool, and MacOS comes with Screenshot (see the keyboard shortcuts Shift-Command-4 to take a screenshot of a selected area, or Shift-Command-3 to capture the entire screen). All are quite handy at capturing a screen, or a part of a screen, and letting you paste it elsewhere or share it. However, for more sophisticated screen capture tools that let you annotate, store, capture video clips and far more Snagit is hard to beat.
Uses
Why would you need a screen clipping tool? In your practice you may want to create training and tutorial documents for clients and your team. You may also want to save screenshots of your website or social media for archival purposes. Screen clips are also handy when reaching out to IT support. Screen clips can also be used in presentations and documents.
Litigators might find screenshots relevant to capture digital conversations such as text message threads, as well as websites and social media posts. A screen clip may also be used a demonstrative aid to in court to explain information to a judge or jury. Transactional attorneys can use screenshots as evidence of an agreement, a record of a transaction, or to show instances of copyright infringement or trademark violation on websites or social media.
Capture
When you install Snagit there will be two components. One is Snagit, which lets you grab screenshots, create videos, extract text, and even copy multiple areas on a screen. The other component is the Snagit Editor. Your captures will open in the Editor for further refinement. Snagit for Windows has an assigned hotkey (keyboard shortcut) that, by default, is Ctrl + Alt + P. If you want to do more than capture a quick screenshot, you can launch the Snagit toolbar. For ease of use you may want to have this enabled when you start your computer. The toolbar floats, mostly hidden, at the top of your screen. Use the keyboard shortcut to grab any part of your screen. Or begin your capture by clicking on the big red button on the toolbar and then options for creating video, capturing a scrolling screen (such as webpage), and more options will appear. You can edit the preset options in Snagit by opening Snagit and going to the File menu. A handy feature is the ability to add a five second delay to your screen grab. This gives you time to arrange the screen exactly as you want to before you capture the screen shot. Each type of capture – image, all in one, video, panoramic scrolling capture, grab text, and more – have presets you can create.
You can add effects to your screenshots. You can automatically add a border, a watermark, capture information about the screenshot including date, time, location, IP, URL, application, etc. and more. You can also add multiple effects by clicking on “add another effect”.
There are mobile apps as well to capture screenshots and images from your phone.
If you create a video, you can also record your microphone, webcam, add screen drawings, and add system audio. This is handy for creating tutorials and instructional videos. If the tutorial involves multiple applications, you can take videos of each part and then easily put them together in the Editor.
Editing
By default, any image or video you capture will automatically open in the SnagIt Editor. The Editor archives all your screen shots and videos. The most recent activity is shown in a toolbar across the bottom of the screen. If you click on Library, you can see all your videos and images organized by date, application, and websites. If you filter to see images captured from a specific application, for instance Microsoft Word, at the top you can further filter by date modified, date created, file name, or size. When you capture a video or image Snagit automatically names the file year_month_date-##-##.snagx. You can rename it and add tags as additional way to find your captures. A .snagx file can be shared between Windows or Mac. If you prefer you can automatically save images to a specific format. After you have edited a file, you can share it in one of any number of image formats, though the default is PNG. The default video file format is .mp4.
Annotating/Editing a Screen Grab
When you open an image in the Editor you will see a toolbar across the top of the screen. You can add arrows, text, callouts, shapes, stamps, drawings, and more to the image. When you click on one of the annotations options a panel to the right will show you options for color, size, and other tool properties. You can also add highlighting to an image, blur, and magnify.
Do you need to alter the image? The Simplify tool lets you add redactions over the image. For instance, if you take a screenshot of a social media profile but want to anonymize the person’s image you could click on “Simplify” and then choose the Avatar style and cover the person’s photo. In the bottom right click on the option to “lock objects” to ensure the cover becomes part of the image and cannot be removed. You can also use the Move function and enable “Smart Move” to move elements of a screenshot around.
Optical Character Recognition
Powered by Abby, open a screenshot in Snagit Editor and click on the Edit menu and choose “Grab Text”. If there is text in your image the included Abby OCR engine will extract the text into a pop-out window, and you can select and copy the text into another application. You can also edit text in an image with the Selection tool and then right click to Edit Text. You can also Grab Text when you capture an image.
Annotating/Editing a Video
The video editing tools in Snagit are not very robust. You can cut out portions of the video and add more videos, but there are no other features such as adding a transcription, adding bookmarks, zooming in, audio enhancement and other video editing options. If you need these types of features there are plenty of video editing tools, including one from Snagit’s parent company Techhit called Camtasia. You can save a video in Snagit Editor to an animated gif.
Create
In the Snagit Editor there is a Create feature. This will let you easily turn a series of screenshots into tutorials. Choose to create an “image from template” and then select a template. You can create a timeline, comparison, reference, steps and many more options. If you want more there are over 100 million professional assets for Snagit, including stamps, templates, themes, photos, and an AI generator for an additional $50 per year. You can also create a video from images.
Sharing
From the Share menu in the Editor, you can send videos and images to many Microsoft and Google applications/locations, as well as Dropbox, Box, Evernote, Slack and email. Depending on where you are sending the image look at the options. For instance, if you send a screenshot to Word you can choose to send it to an open file or a new file and then copy it into the document or link to the file. You can also share a screenshot with your team and discuss it by using the Screencast app that comes with your purchase of Snagit. Just click on the “Share Link” in the upper right corner.
Conclusion
Snagit is a feature rich screenshot and video creation tool. In the past your one-time purchase covered the cost of a license until a new version came out. The current version is Snagit 2024 and you can upgrade for $35. If you are a new Snagit user the cost is $39 per year for the individual subscription, though there is a perpetual license option for small teams at $63 per user billed once and the licenses are transferable. Snagit has a free trial. Paid plans include live support, maintenance and upgrades. There are lots of tutorials, help files, webinars, and training resources available as well.