Make the most of the snipping tools in Windows

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ISSUE 22.06 • 2025-02-10 WINDOWS 11 By Mary Branscombe When you need a record of something you see on screen, Windows has multiple tools — plus ways t
[See the full post at: Make the most of the snipping tools in Windows]

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abbodi86, fisher75, wryker, rc primak, lmacri, WSDKS01, Alex5723

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Windows 10 22H2.
I use the PrtSc key and past to Paint app.
In Paint I cut, edit…

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That’s so Windows 1.0 😉

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rc primak

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Indeed. Unless there is some trade/profession specific needs that I have no clue about (which is not out of the realm of possibilities!) I don’t know why folks pay for ‘apps’ or go through contortions when PrtSC and paint have worked so simply and predictably for untold centuries. IDK? just my 2cents…

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Windows 11 24H2 I put a shortcut for the tool into the Taskbar so it is in front of me. Easier than a shortcut.

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Mary Branscombe, rc primak

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If I am taking a screenshot that I plan on editing, I take the screenshot with Word. It opens in Word ready for editing. Word has way more editing capabilities than any of the Snip, Capture tools, or Paint such as this example:

HTH, Dana:))

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rbailin

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I use Greenshot, it does most everything I want it to do and it’s free. While it is a little old, there are more recent “unstable” versions that seem to work fine.

https://getgreenshot.org

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Thanks for the article showing all the screenshot options built into Windows.

Windows 11, 23H2 — I generally leave the Snipping Tool for Win 11 in all of its defaults. If I want to do something with a capture in Word, I might have to extract the text, but otherwise, I find it’s safer just to save the capture to my Desktop, import it into Word or LibreOffice writer, and work from there.  (LibreOffice also has a module called Draw.)

If I want to do more serious image editing, I use whatever app is available in my Windows setup. Paint is a nice default, but sometimes the added power of The GIMP or a Windows-specific image editing program is needed.

(As a mostly Linux user, I have different drawing, editing and screenshot options when using Linux.)

-- rc primak

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Taking the screenshots for this post meant using *all* of the different tools I mention; not just to test that they all worked the way I thought they did, but so that I could use one snipping tool to take a screenshot of another. At one point I even hauled out the tool I used before OneNote got a snipping tool, ClipMate – because it has an option to capture the cursor as well!

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I’ve never been happy with any of these cumbersome approaches to what should be as simple as copy and paste.

Thank goodness I found the Vivaldi browser!  I don’t know why Microsoft doesn’t take a page from Vivaldi and simply what should be a simple process.

 

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Ctrl+shift+S – did not know about that and i really like how easy it is to pull it up using those keys vs hunting for it using search!

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Mary Branscombe

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Because I had a question about this elsewhere and I didn’t mention how to handle HDR if you have an HDR system and want to capture screenshots, there’s an option in the Windows 11 Snipping Tool to handle HDR; and because most HDR is still in games, when you use the Game Bar to take a screenshot, that will automatically handle both HDR and fixed-colour SDR.

 

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It’s not free but Snagit has been my go to for years. and I can find things easliy in the library. You really get what what you pay for.

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I have always used “SRip32”, simple to use, unlike Microsoft’s insane complexity.

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yeah, why have my posts started to double up??????????????? I hit submit only once.

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Did you by any chance double click?

 

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For years ( mean over a decade) I’ve used a little program called Clipmate 7.  Sadly it’s been abandoned by its owner.  It still works on my Win10 machine, but I’ve lost the install program.  I have collections of snippets I’ve accumulated.  Backed up in zip files.  I wish there was something equivalent.  I’m reading through the info above but don’t see the same functionality.  If there are any suggestions please let me know!  I’ve attached a pic of what it looks like

 

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Reinbeau wrote:

I wish there was something equivalent.  I’m reading through the info above but don’t see the same functionality.  If there are any suggestions please let me know!

Many users claim that CopyQ is equivalent to Clipmate and most say it is better.  It is free, open source. they have a portable version, and it is cross platform working with many different OSs.

CopyQ

 

HTH, Dana:))

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Mary Branscombe, Reinbeau

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I adore ClipMate and I still use it every day and I have the free licence codes saved for putting on all my new machines (and I bug Microsoft to make sure it works under emulation for Windows on Arm), but because the developer retired and isn’t going to work on it any more, I have been worried about Windows changes making it stop working one day (and the UI doesn’t cope well with modern screen resolutions). I’d always hoped someone might persuade the ClipMate dev to open source his code: great to hear there’s something similar and it looks like if you’re able to use the scripting language you can create many of the text editing features built in to ClipMate (and make your own like the ClipMate macros), and there are a bunch of plugins that add more of the functionality and even (to keep this on topic) take screenshots, but not with the ClipMate option of including the cursor. The area where it seems to miss most of the ClipMate functionality is search: looks like just a word wheel text filter rather than the many filtering options based on source, capture time and format, or the canned searches that created virtual folders – but since it’s open source, there’s always the hope someone will decide to work on those features! thanks for the link!

 

 

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Ooooh, now, if it’ll import Clipmate files….thank you so much!

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it doesn’t look as if it has an option to import ClipMate backups, so you’d probably have to copy each ClipMate collection item to a CopyQ tab individually; if you’re going to that much effort you may want to look into some of the other clipboard managers as well (Ditto, AceText, ClipboardFusion, ClipClip, ClipJump, Clipto – but I don’t think any of them match up to ClipMate, personally).

If you want to grab the ClipMate installer just in case, it’s at http://www.clipmate.com/download.htm

If you need the ClipMate licence keys, you can find them here http://www.clipmate.com/buynow.php?prod=CM&ec=PLIMUS

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Spiral, Reinbeau

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What a shame the Clipmate developer wouldn’t just share his work so it could be continued.

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yes, I do wish he’d found a way to have it continue but selling a tiny brand when your accountant is pushing you to wrap up the business must be a lot of work and I think he’d have had to rip out the licensing system to make it open source. I still hope someone might find a way to rescue it!

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I use the print screen option which opens a small box at the top that offers basic modes for recording video or snipping a screen shot based on the screen section you choose. It’s all I need

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