SnagIt Review – a Review of SnagIt Screen Capture Software from Techsmith

An example screen capture using Techsmith's SnagIt software

The SnagIt software from Techsmith is something I use on a regular weekly – often in fact, daily – basis, and I’m a big fan, so it seemed only appropriate to do a review (and not I should note for any commercial gain … there is no affiliate program – I just like it!).

You’ll be able to see below how I use it myself, and consider if it’s something you could use yourself.

First off, it’s probably best to see how I used to manage without this software. For any screen capture I wanted to do, it was a case of hitting Alt & Prt Sc on my PC, and then pasting into something like PaintShop Pro and manipulating the image as necessary to suit my purposes. It all took extra effort, but most importantly, you just can’t do a lot of stuff that you can do using SnagIt.

For example, say I was setting up some instructions on how to use something, let’s say how to use the Twitter feature on Google’s toolbar (via their new Share feature), it took all of 10 seconds to take the screen capture image on the right.

Using some very quick tools on the menu within the software, you can give it the torn edge look (and these are fully customizable to give whatever finish you want), along with the shadow effect.

You can then add arrows, speech bubbles, additional text, whatever really, to customize the image to whatever you need.

What I especially like is how you can choose to include the cursor in the image – so as soon as you click the Prt Scr button to take the SnagIt screen capture, whatever you were doing with the mouse just freezes, including any tooltip text, and it captures it all.

What I use it for most are for creating instructions for my virtual team to follow.

I systemize and proceduralize virtually everything in my business into a system that someone else can then follow, and it just makes outsourcing a whole lot easier when you have some instructions to provide that say go here, click that, do this, and you have images to back up the text and illustrate what you’re talking about.

Verbal instructions can only go so far.

Yes, I could also do it with video, but they’re less easy to use as a quick reference point for team members in the future, if they’re unsure on a specific aspect of instruction, and less easily updateable.

I also use it for blog posts (heh, like this one, yep!), for creating informational products, and for quick inter-team member communications (eg. bug fixing, say I see something my end that one of my developers doesn’t, due to browser/operating system differences, and so on).

You can also use it to take a shot of a whole scrolling webpage (rather than just the portion of the webpage you see on the screen), and I’ve used that in the past when I wanted to check with a team member on what they could see from their locality, in comparison to what I saw at my end. Web pages tailored to the locality of your visitor? Think about it …

All in all, SnagIt is one of my essential day-t0-day tools that I’d struggle to be without for long. I can generally run my business from anywhere in the world on any computer with an Internet connection if I had to (how’s that for risk reduction?!), but this is some installed software I’d certainly feel I was missing if I was forced to do without it for any length of time.

I’ve only really just scratched the surface of this software – not just in terms of what I’ve written in this post, but also in terms of how I use the software (I still regularly discover new things I can do with it) – so I’d certainly recommend taking a look yourself.

By the way, I’m  not doing this review of SnagIt in the hope of an affiliate commission – they don’t in fact have an affiliate program. I recommend stuff I use, like and can genuinely recommend – if there is an affiliate program, then all well and good, I am after all running a business. But it’s not a good enough reason for me to recommend something on its own.

So how do you get hold of the SnagIt software?

Full details are on their website here: SnagIt – Screen Capture Software from Techsmith

You can currently try it out for free for 30 days via the above link, and then purchase a license if you want to continue using it. So download the software now, try it out, and let me know what you think – are you starting to wonder how you ever did without it? Just leave a comment below.

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