Snipping Tool Plus review

Take screen grabs with a click, add annotations and export them in your preferred format automatically

TechRadar Verdict

Snipping Tool Plus is a well made and convenient screenshot tool. If you often need to crop and annotate screengrabs, it's a real timesaver.

Pros

  • +

    Includes image-editing

  • +

    Can send screen grabs as email attachments

  • +

    Saves in several different formats

Cons

  • -

    Only available in German

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Snipping Tool Plus is enormously popular, but is only available in German. That said, the interface is well designed, with icons that make it easy to use even if you don't speak the language.

Snipping Tool Plus

Where to download: http://www.rene-zeidler.de

Type: Screen capture

Developer: Rene Zeidler

Operating system: Windows

Version: 3.4.1.0

Windows Vista and Windows 7 brought the Snipping Tool to our PCs, letting us take screenshots of selected areas or whole windows with a single click. Snipping Tool Plus brings this convenient function to all versions of Windows.

Snipping Tool Plus is a portable app, so there’s no need to install it – just extract the contents of the downloaded ZIP archive and double-click the EXE file to run it whenever you want to take a grab.

Unlike some screen capture tools, Snipping Tool Plus can’t record video, but its small size and built-in editing tools make it a superb choice for quickly explaining something happening on screen. It’s far more convenient than hitting Print Screen, then opening a separate image editor to make annotations.

User experience

After Snipping Tool Plus starts, choose whether to capture the current active window, a freehand selection, or the whole screen. A basic image editor image will then open, enabling you to blur parts of the image to protect confidential information, and add notes and markers.

Snipping Tool plus can export screen grabs in BMP, JPG, PNG, GIF or TIFF format, and save them automatically in a location of your choice or send them via email. You can also set the quality setting and image size (in pixels or centimetres), and choose a background image color if the area you’ve chosen to capture a small area.

You can also choose to take screenshots at set intervals with Snipping Tool Plus. This is an excellent alternative to recording video if you want to create a time-lapse video, for example, or don’t have the necessary disk space for recording continuously over a long period. 

Snipping Tool Plus a very convenient little tool to have on hand, and well worth keeping on a USB stick or a cloud storage service.

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Cat Ellis

Cat is the editor of TechRadar's sister site Advnture. She’s a UK Athletics qualified run leader, and in her spare time enjoys nothing more than lacing up her shoes and hitting the roads and trails (the muddier, the better)