Snagit on Mac: First look at this powerful screen capture tool

Back in December of 2009, I reported on the public beta of Snagit on Mac, a screenshot tool for Mac from TechSmith, the folks who bring you the Camtasia screen recorder. Well, the beta is over, and after 100,000+ testers gave the app a good scrubbing, it's now available for sale for US$49.95.

Snagit isn't a new product -- it's been around on the Windows platform since 1991 -- but Snagit on Mac is new. One purchase of the application on either platform gives you a non-concurrent use license for both Windows and Mac. I had tried out Snagit on Mac during early beta and frankly wasn't impressed, but I'm pleased to say that the release version is replacing my current screenshot solution. Tech bloggers and authors do a tremendous number of screenshots, so switching to a new tool isn't something that is done lightly.

Follow along with me as I give you a first look at Snagit on Mac.

Snagit on Mac

The application is quite polished, which I'd expect from the people who make Camtasia. After installing the application on my iMac, I took some time to look at the videos and other help documentation that TechSmith has made available in the Snagit on Mac Learning Center. These are well-done videos, even pointing out some limitations of various tools.

To describe how a tech author would use Snagit on Mac, it's helpful to know how I do screen captures right now. I use Snapz Pro X, which is a favorite app of mine but hasn't been updated in quite some time. It grabs windows, full screens, or selections, and can even capture video. Well, once I do a screenshot in Snapz Pro X, I usually have to do something with it -- crop it, blur out something, or add an annotation. There are no tools to do that in Snapz Pro X, so I have the program set up to open screenshots in Preview to do some minor editing. If I need to do more, I open up another program... Get the picture? It's good for capturing the images, but not for annotating them.

Launching Snagit on Mac opens an editor window and a small pop out called the capture window. The capture window hangs around on the right side of the screen by default, although you can move it anywhere or even have it float on your Mac screen. When it is just waiting, all you see is a tiny black tab on the side of your screen. Clicking the tab expands the capture window to show a capture button, a dropdown to change modes between "all in one capture" or "window capture," a way to change the keyboard shortcut for a screenshot, open the editor window, and more.

When in all-in-one capture mode, a yellow crosshair appears on the Mac screen, which is dimmed. As the crosshair is moved around, different parts of different windows are highlighted. Clicking the mouse button takes the screenshot. Even if the window is partially obscured by other windows, the entire window is captured. If the crosshairs are placed over the desktop, the entire desktop is captured. One really cool feature is the ability to capture scrolling windows. For Firefox, there's an add-in that enables the capability to capture a full-length web page. I tried the feature on the TUAW home page and got a file that was 1008 pixels wide by 9698 pixels high. That's a great way to capture a full web page in one shot. All-in-one capture mode also lets you select an area to capture by dragging the crosshairs over a region and then letting up on the mouse button.

With window capture mode turned on, clicking the capture button shows an Exposé-like set of individual windows. Moving the cursor over any of the windows displays a title, and clicking the mouse button captures the window.

Where do the captured photos end up? They're temporarily stored in a captures folder, time and date stamped with a .snagproj file extension. They also appear in a scrolling tray at the bottom of the editor window called the captures tray. The most recent capture is on the left side, with older captures to the right. To edit any of the screenshots, you click on the image in the captures tray to expand it, then use the editor tools.

There are both tools and effects. Tools include cropping, text balloons, arrows that can be curved all over the place by adding handles, stamps (such as the Mac "spinning wheel of death" seen on the title graphic), pens and markers, blurs, lines, shapes, fills (including the ability to make any color transparent), and erasers.

Any image can be shared by either emailing it, sending it to TechSmith's Screencast.com service, or to an FTP server. The sharing tools are all add-ins, so it's likely that we'll see ways to share to Dropbox, Evernote, and MobileMe soon.

Any complaints? I wish that there was a built-in way to scale an image. You can choose to have a new "canvas" at a certain size, but I can't find a way to take a large screenshot and scale it down to a predetermined size without taking it to another tool. Also, I'd like to have captures that I have deleted from the captures tray disappear from the captures folder as well. Now I have to go into the Finder (a single click opens the folder in the Finder), and drag those items to the Trash.

All-in-all, Snagit on Mac looks like it is well worth the $49.95 price tag. If you want to try it out, download a 30-day free trial and then purchase the app if it seems like it will work for your purposes.

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Source: http://www.techsmith.com/snagit/features/mac/

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Software Mac

Back in December of 2009, I reported on the public beta of Snagit on Mac, a screenshot tool for Mac from TechSmith, the folks who bring...

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Greg Roberts

$49.95 for a screenshot tool? Who are they kidding?

November 11 2010 at 8:07 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Auggie1515

I'm using Snapz ProX and I find that I'm limited on where I can save a screengrab after taking one. Just on the desktop or in the Pictures folder. Does anyone know of a power user screengrab program like Snapz ProX that I can control where I save screengrabs to?

November 10 2010 at 6:07 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Thomas

Snagit is nice for a 1.0, but it's not Mac-like at all.

You might wanna give Voila http://www.globaldelight.com/voila/voila_overview.html a try instead.

November 10 2010 at 10:57 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

woody

What does snagit on windows do that hitting printscreen doesn't? Also, windows 7 comes with a nice, free little utility called Snipping Tool (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Use-Snipping-Tool-to-capture-screen-shots)

November 10 2010 at 9:37 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to woody's comment

TexRob

If you read the article, or any of the comments, you'd know. Snipping tool is nice, if that's all you need. Snagit may seem pricey at $50, but for people making manuals, documenting processes, constantly screencapping for blogging, etc, it's worth every penny. It allows you so many options, scrolling web pages, capturing specific dialog boxes or windows, specific frames of a web page, the list goes on and on. Add in the simple to use graphic editing for things like arrows, text bubbles, etc and it's a lot more than just screen capture. And then of course there are things like PDF creation, etc, which are so simple and all in one app, rather than using 5 free aps to do something 1 app can do, and better/easier.

Snagit has been around forever, started out very humble as a basic tool, and has grown to be an amazing application (not just bloatware). Unless it has changed, they also have a great upgrade program, usually allowing free upgrades to newer versions to a point.

November 10 2010 at 10:56 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

SigW

Back when I was using a Windows PC I've been a big fan of SnagIt, because of its scrolling Webbrowser snapshot feature, before I discovered the Firefox extension ScreenGrab. Unfortunately I was still stuck to SnagIt when using IE occasionally.
However, now on the Mac I am using the Firefox ScreenGrab extension when I want to capture something rendered with the Gecko engine (yes, I am a developer) or the great Clip it! Tool (http://www.headnix.com/) when I want to capture something with the Webkit rendering engine.

While those are great screen capture tools, they of course don't offer image editing, but at least they can capture scrolling Webbrowser pages which is missing on the Mac OS X built-in screen capture feature ;-)

November 10 2010 at 5:09 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Guido

What about Awesomescreenshot Free PlugIn?
http://awesomescreenshot.com/

Does everything including anotation, whole Page SC and so on.

cheers

November 10 2010 at 3:10 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Tim

Skitch is great and I've used it regularly for almost 3 years. However, it doesn't handle pdf's well - exported quality is poor. Skitch acknowledge this but don't seem in a rush to fix it.

November 10 2010 at 3:08 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

umijin

I'm confused - doesn't techsmith do Jing, which has the same functionality?

Skitch is the bomb, and when they release an upgrade (paid or not) expect it to be right up at the top of the pack.

November 10 2010 at 1:13 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Brad

Another vote for Skitch (FREE) skitch.com. I use it daily and did I mention it's FREE?

November 09 2010 at 10:16 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

john

What's the difference between the beta and this new release? I've been using the beta for what seems like forever. Am I going to get anything better if I purchase this new version? or should I keep what I've been using.

Thanks
John

November 09 2010 at 10:10 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to john's comment

Carmen

John:

Aside from stability and bug fixes, the release version also adds the
ability to output to FTP and Screencast.com. As mentioned above, the
outputs are add-ins, so you will also be able to pick up new output
destinations as they are released.

November 09 2010 at 11:16 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply