Greenshot

Greenshot takes a screenshot and asks, in the same breath, what you want done with it. Press the Print key and drag a green rectangle over part of the screen. Add a modifier to grab the active window or the whole display.

The capture lands in a small editor where arrows, boxes, numbered markers and text go on in a few clicks, and anything private gets blurred or pixelated. Then a destination picker offers the clipboard, a file, the printer, an email, an office document or an image host, and the screenshot is on its way. The whole cycle runs in seconds.

The design is narrow on purpose. There is no video recording and no account. Capture it, mark it up, send it, done. The region tool shows a magnifier for pixel-accurate edges, and every capture mode has a hotkey. The destinations can be fixed in the settings so a capture goes straight to the clipboard without the editor ever appearing.

Greenshot is open source and maintained, with a plugin system that adds destinations such as image hosts and office programs. Its one well-known weakness, a scrolling capture mode that only ever worked in a browser nobody runs any more, is covered honestly below.

The capture modes

Capture region is the everyday Greenshot mode, bound to Print by default. Drag a rectangle and release. A magnifier beside the cursor shows the pixels at the edge, so a border lands exactly where it should. Capture last region repeats the previous rectangle, which is how a series of screenshots of the same dialog stays identically framed.

Capture window grabs a window in one click, with a setting that chooses the window under the cursor or the active one, and it can include or exclude the window’s shadow. Capture fullscreen takes every monitor or the one the cursor is on.

Captures can be delayed by a chosen number of seconds for menus that close when a key is pressed. The cursor can be included or hidden. For a quick capture that no longer needs the editor, a tray-menu click does the same as the hotkey.

The scrolling capture that no longer works

A fifth Greenshot mode once captured a complete scrolling web page. It did so by asking a particular browser for the page image rather than by scrolling, so it never worked anywhere else. That browser has been retired, and the mode with it. There is no scrolling capture for current browsers.

Anyone who needs one should know that before installing, since the older guides still promise it. For a long page today, the choice is a browser’s own full-page capture or a tool built around scrolling.

The editor and its obfuscation tools

The Greenshot editor opens after a capture unless you tell it not to. Its toolbar draws rectangles and ellipses, lines and arrows, freehand strokes and text boxes. A highlighter marks a region, and a counter tool drops numbered circles for step-by-step instructions. Every element stays editable, so an arrow can be moved or recoloured after the fact and a text box reworded. A speech bubble handles callouts. Cropping and rotation cover the basics, with brightness and contrast for a capture taken on a dim display.

Obfuscation is the part support and documentation people rely on. Select a region and blur or pixelate it, with the strength adjustable, so a customer’s name or an account number disappears before the image leaves the machine.

A border and a drop shadow dress a capture for a document, and a torn-edge effect marks a cropped image. The result saves in the editor’s own format for later changes or as a flat image for sending, and anything heavier goes to a full image editor.

Destinations, and skipping the editor

After a capture, or after editing, the Greenshot destination picker lists where the image can go. Save to a file with a name built from date, time, window title and a counter. Save with a dialog to choose the folder. Copy to the clipboard, send to the printer, attach to an email, open in an external editor, or hand it to a plugin destination. Several destinations can fire at once, so a capture saves to disk and lands on the clipboard in one step.

The settings fix any of this. A user who only ever wants the clipboard sets that as the sole destination, and the editor never opens. A capture is pasted into a chat a second after Print. A user who always files captures sets the folder and the name pattern once and never sees a dialog again.

That configurability is why the tool fits both the person who takes three screenshots a year and the one who takes a hundred a day.

Plugins and text recognition

Greenshot plugins add destinations for image hosts, cloud storage, issue trackers and office programs. Each sends the capture directly, with a link returned to the clipboard where that applies. They install with the main program and switch on individually, and the plugin interface is open, so destinations for internal tools have been written by the teams that needed them. An external editor destination opens the capture in any image editor you name.

Text recognition works through the system’s own recognition component, so text in a capture can be copied as text where that component is present. It is basic, a convenience rather than a document scanner. A tool such as PicPick, which bundles a colour picker, a ruler and a whiteboard alongside its capture, shows how much further a utility of this kind can sprawl.

Where it stands beside the alternatives

Against the system’s own snipping tool, Greenshot wins on the editor, the obfuscation and the destinations, and loses on nothing that matters for a still image. Against ShareX, it loses on breadth, since that tool records video and GIFs, captures scrolling pages in any browser and automates workflows. It wins on simplicity, since the whole program is understood in ten minutes.

The interface is plain, and the editor looks like the utility it is rather than a design tool. For a screenshot that must be marked up and sent in under a minute, with a face blurred and an arrow pointing at the button, nothing here gets in the way. That is the whole argument.

Conclusion

Greenshot suits anyone who takes screenshots to explain something, from support staff marking up a customer’s screen to writers illustrating a manual, and who wants the capture annotated and anonymised, then sent, in one short motion. The editor’s obfuscation tools and the destination picker are the two reasons it beats the built-in snipping tool for that work.

It does not scroll, record or do much beyond its one job. Set the destinations once, learn the four hotkeys, and it becomes a tool you forget is installed until the day you use another machine and miss it.