RWT Webmaster Tools Blog

Screen Captures in Firefox with Snapper

Pressing the PrtScn button on a keyboard captures the whole screen via Windows. It is easy and convienent. But capturing the whole screen is less than ideal especially in terms of clarity and resolutin. A lot of times it is handy to capture only a portion of the screen. There are several tools which do this, but they are not free. The Snapper extension for Firefox is free and does an excellent job of doing screen captures.

Of course, one needs to be using Firefox. If you are not, I highly recommend you at least try it out.

After installing the extension, a little red fish will appear in the lower right status bar. (If the fish doesn’t appear, restart the browser after installation.)

Using Snapper:

1. Click on the fish. The mouth opens. Snapper is ready to snap!
2. Using you mouse, click and drag a red box around the piece of the screen you would like to capture.
3. Release the mouse button.
4. A Save Box appears. Snapper saves files in PNG format.
5. Save.

Snapper can be set to automatically save images in a specified directory.

There is one major con to using Snapper. It can only capture what resides within the Firefox browsing window. Thus, no desktop captures. You will need a more robust tool to accomplish that. However, if your main screen capture needs are off the Net, then Snapper will prove to be a handy tool.

[tags]firefox, snapper[/tags]