The amount of tools available out there to capture your system’s screen doesn’t stop to grow, but not many of them can boast of being free, of allowing you to produce animated GIFs directly out of your desktop, or uploading your images and GIFs to the cloud straight away, or of giving you the option to produce static presentations complete with arrows, numbers, text, or circles. Screentake does all that, and then some more.
This free screen capture utility takes screenshots to the next level by allowing you to add lines, highlights, arrows, clear or solid circles and rectangles, text, and numbers in the easiest and most convenient way. All of these elements are customizable in terms of size, color, position, etc., and can be combined in any way your screenshot requires.
The program selects entire active windows just by clicking on them and allows you to select any section of your desktop using your mouse. For more accurate operations, you can open the Set Size/Location dialog and enter values for the top and left positions as well as the width and height of either your capture or the clipart elements included.
What makes this screen capture tool stand out from the rest is its capability of creating GIFs in an extremely simple way. All you have to do is define some parameters about the recording time, the color of the frame, the frames per second, the resolution, and other quality-related features, and select the section of the screen where all the action is. The “recording”, once properly converted into an animated GIF file, can then be saved to disk or directly to the cloud – another exclusive feature that you won’t find easily in any many similar tools.
Saving your GIFs to the cloud – and getting a link to them – is not exclusive to the program’s GIF recordings. You can make that same choice between saving to disk or uploading to the web with any of the images created using Screentake. This will help you save valuable disk space and will make it easier for you to share your screenshots and animated GIFs with your friends, family, or colleagues. All you need to do is send them an e-mail with the link(s), for instance.
All in all, Screentake is certainly a peculiar screen capture utility. Apart from the functionality that we all expect to find in a software program of this type, it is refreshing to see that some developers still make the effort to offer us something else, something different. If only for this, and for its unbeatable price, this is a tool worth trying and keeping.
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