Capture the screen, save the images to different formats, record video, generate GIF animations, upload them online, make photo adjustments, or apply watermarks automatically.
- APP : ShareX
- Version : 15.0.0
- License : Donationware
- OS : Windows
- Developer : ShareX Developers
ShareX Description
ShareX is a feature-rich and powerful screenshot grabbing tool for Windows users. Honestly, it’s one the most impressive graphic capturing tools we’ve come across on Softpedia in the freeware section.
It’s open-source and filled with numerous configuration settings to help you upload the images online, execute automatic post-grabbing actions, making image adjustments, applying watermarks, and a lot more.
Free and open-source snapshot grabber
Firstly, you can make a clean and rapid installation with ShareX, thanks to the fact that it doesn’t bundle third-party components. It creates an icon in the system tray at startup for quick access, allowing you to rapidly capture the screen in several ways as well as bring up the main window for tinkering with settings.
Manual or automatic capturing mode
It is possible to capture the full screen, active window, monitor, rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, triangle, diamond, polygon, free hand and last region, as well as to start a recording session and save the footage as a video or a GIF animations.
An automatic image capturing mode can be enabled for those times when you plan to leave the workstation unattended while indirectly keeping an eye on its activity. You can specify the repeat time, select a region or full screen, as well as set it to automatically minimize to the system tray area and to wait until the uploads are complete.
Copy, save, adjust, enhance, and upload grabbed photos
As far as post-capturing actions go, you can resize images, add watermarks and captions, borders or shadows, print pictures or copy them to the Clipboard, save them to a preferred file type on the disk (e.g. PNG, JPG), as well as upload them and specify the host. Here, the beauty is that you can select multiple actions to take into account simultaneously and automatically. For instance, you can save the image to file, copy it the Clipboard, and upload it on a server at the same time.
Once the pictures are uploaded, you can use a URL shortener, post the link to a social networking platform, or send it via email. ShareX offers support for multiple hosts when it comes to the image uploader (e.g. Imgur.com, Pastebin.com, Dropbox.com), text uploader (e.g. Pastebin.com, Pastee.org), file uploader (e.g. Google Drive, FTP server, shared folder) and URL shortener (e.g. Bit.ly, Goo.gl).
Special emphasis is put on hotkeys configuration, as you can add key combinations to basically anything, whether we’re talking about uploading Clipboard contents, recording the screen, or capturing an active window. Other settings focus on playing sound after a capture is made, saving task info to history, adjusting quality, resizing pictures and applying effects, among many others.
Evaluation and conclusion
The tool had minimal impact on computer performance during our tests. It definitely has an abundance of options and customization options to offer. The main downside to it is that it takes a while to discover its entire potential. On top of that, the default configuration is not necessarily intuitive, so it’s advisable to personalize everything before running ShareX. Overall, we were extremely pleased with this free, open-source and comprehensive screenshot grabbing tool.