The Windows Snipping Tool has improved iteration after iteration, but it still lags behind many third-party screenshot apps, which usually offer more customization options and additional settings you can tweak. If you’re looking for an open-source alternative, you’re in luck: there is a great one.
ShareX Is a Flexible Open-Source Screenshot Tool
At its most basic,ShareXis a screenshot and clipping tool just like the Windows Snipping Tool. Press the correct shortcut (by default Ctrl+Print Screen) and you’ve got yourself a screenshot. But it can do so much more.
Like the Snipping Tool, you have a whole slew of shortcuts to take pictures of specific regions, your active window, or pretty much any other combination that you can think of. Unlike Snipping Tool, however, you can set the shortcuts to whatever you want.
It also makes it wonderfully easy to capture screenshots of any active window.
Since I can change the hotkeys, I changed them from the default options, then put those shortcuts on my mouse buttons using Razr’s Synapse software. That lets me capture screenshots with just the press of a button, which is more handy than you might think when you do it a lot.
ShareX Can Do So Much More Than Snipping Tool
While they share many of the same basic functions, ShareX takes everything that the Snipping Tool has and dials it up to 11, and adds dozens (if not more) additional options.
Flexible Capture Options
The Windows Snipping Tool really only has five different capture options: active window, desktop, a user-defined rectangle, or a video.
ShareX, on the other hand, supports all of those, plus it supports capturing GIFs, an animated image format that is extremely common, and scrolling screenshots, which are exceptionally handy if you’re trying to capture a screenshot taller than your current display.
You can also set up autocapture, which will automatically take screenshots on a set interval. It is a bit more niche, but I’ve found it helpful when I want to collect screen captures from a presentation.
Versatile Image Editing
The Snipping Tool does have basic editing tools, but they’rereallybasic. you may draw some simple shapes, highlight, crop, and draw.
On the other hand, ShareX is roughly equivalent to Microsoft Paint, except forthe AI features, of course. It can blur and pixelate images, crop, resize, and rotate images. You can add emojis, draw shapes, and, best of all? It has a color picker, which makes marking up screenshots so they match the content way easier.
Cloud Sync
You can easily set up Snipping Tool to drop your screenshots into your OneDrive folder if that is what youuse for a cloud backup, but anything more than that requires manually jumping through some hoops.
ShareX, on the other hand, actually makes it a bittooeasy to sync your screenshots to the cloud.
ShareX will sync your screenshots to the cloudby default.You should disable this setting immediately, which I address later in the article.
ShareX supports more than 20 file, text, or cloud sync options right out of the box. Odds are, if you use it, it is available immediately.
On the off chance that it isn’t included by default, you can manually configure pretty much any other cloud service you might want, including one you self-host, if that is your thing.
A Little Busy with a Learning Curve
The only significant problem with ShareX is just how much there is. It has an enormous number of settings, customization options, and functions, and they’re not always super easy to find.
As an example, if you want to change what happens when you take a screenshot, you can control pretty much everything.
You get that level of control over pretty much anything if you’re willing to dig through the settings to get it. I’ve found the default settings are usually close enough for my purposes, however.
A Word of Warning: Disable Automated Uploads
Alarmingly, ShareX is configured to automatically upload your screenshots to a publicly accessible cloud, and it doesn’t even tell you that. I’d recommend you disable that function immediately until you sort of what options you’d like to use.
To do so, right-click the ShareX icon and select “Application settings.”
Select “Advanced” in the left-hand column, then scroll down until you reach the Upload section. Click the button next to DisableUpload and change it from “False” to “True.”
I also blocked it in my firewall, just to be sure.
However, if you did accidentally upload something, it is fairly easy to remove, though the setting is completely buried.
Go to the Main Window, then navigate to Image History. Right-click on the image you want to remove, then go to Open > Deletion URL. If Deletion URL is grayed out, that means the image hasn’t been uploaded.
The fact that ShareX automatically uploads your screenshots to the internet would normally be an immediate deal breaker for me, but because the program is superb in all other ways, I work around it.
