Selling out? A review of Snapit.

I must officially be a blogger now because I received my first "request for product review" email this week.  It was requesting me to write a review on my blog about a product called Snapit .   I'd never heard of it but the email said I would be given a free product license if I reviewed it.  I'd heard of this practice recently on the news because I guess some people think bloggers should have to disclose they are receiving something in return for their reviews. 

I went to the Snapit website to see what Snapit does.   It turns out Snapit is a tool for easily making screeen captures - a picture of what's on your computer screen.  This is something I rarely need to do but when I do I google "windows screen capture"  and remind myself how it's done: get what you want on your screen and press ALT+Print Screen.  This makes a copy of what's on your screen. Go to the program you need the image in and paste it. What could be easier than that?  It seemed to me that Snapit would be a waste of money no matter what the price (currently $17.99). 

I figured I'd give it a try anyway.  I had just recently needed to do some screen captures and found that I had to open the captures with my image editing program, crop them and then resave them.  I was getting the whole computer screen in the capture when all I really wanted was a section of it.  Again, not too difficult to do but if Snapit could make that easier than maybe it would be worth $17.99 . 

Snapit has a trail version that's available online and can be used for 14 days.  I downloaded (just over 1 mb) and installed it in less that 3 minutes including reading the license agreement (which was amazingly short).
Once installed a small camera icon shows up in the system tray:

Right click on the camera and choose properties and you can set what folder you want screeen captures saved into and have Snapit assign names automatically.  If you don't do this the screen capture will be copied to windows clip board and can be pasted when needed.  You can also set what key to press for a screen capture.  The default is Print Screen.  I set up Snapit to save to a folder I called "Snapit screen captures" and to name them capture1.jpg, capture2.jpg, etc. (You can also save as gif, tiff, png and bmp files.)

You can take captures two ways: press "printscreen" or click on the camera icon.  Clicking the camera icon saves the entire screen (using the auto-save setting) or the active window (without auto-save).  Using the "print screen" button changes the cursor to a cross.  Use the cross to select the area you want to capture and if you're using auto-save you're done! The file is automatically saved for use whenever you need it.  No need to paste then crop than save again. Now that is easy.  If you need to use screen captures on a regular basis then Snapit will definitely make your life a lot easier.  Download it and try it for yourself. (Note that Snapit is currently only available for use with Wwindows 95/98/ME/NT/XP/2000/2003/Vista)

Now can I have my free license?