The standard Windows screen capture tools have always been a little on the basic side, so if the PrtSc key doesn’t satisfy your needs then you’ve probably looked into extending it with a third-party alternative.
But for some people, at least, these can introduce new problems of their own. You might have new hotkeys to learn, a lengthy list of capture types to explore, editing and annotation options, a range of output destinations, and maybe a sizeable settings dialog, too. If you’ll use all that, great; but if it’s overkill, if you really just need an easy way to save captures to file, then Purrint may be a better choice.
The program is extremely basic. Purrint doesn’t support capturing freehand regions or scrolling windows, for instance: it’ll only grab the full screen (although this does support multiple monitors) or an individual application window. There are no annotation options. And you can’t send images to Facebook, Flickr or any other online destination when you’re done.
By way of compensation, though, Purrint is also very simple to use. There are no new hotkeys: just press PrtSc or Alt+PrtSc as usual. The program then pops up a window displaying the captured image. And you can either copy the image to the clipboard, print it, or save it to disc (in BMP, PNG, JPG or GIF formats) with a click.
It can be inconvenient to display this dialog every single time, of course. But fortunately the developer has realized that, and you’re able to tell Purrint to choose particular options automatically. Which means that if you need to capture a series of grabs, say, you can just keep hitting PrtSc or Alt+PrtSc, and have the program automatically save sequentially named files to disc (perhaps Purrint001.bmp, Purrint002.bmp, Purrint003.bmp and so on).
There are some interesting configuration options, too. You can have a particular program launched every time you press PrtSc, for example, handy if that might help you process the grab. And there’s a timed capture option, so for instance you might have Purrint save an image of your desktop every five minutes. (See the Readme.txt file with the program for more details.)
Best of all, though, Purrint is presented in a very simple and straightforward way. The program comes in the form of a portable 277KB executable, so no installation is required; it runs under any version of Windows from 95 upwards; and it’s very lightweight, grabbing at most just a little over 2MB RAM (and usually significantly less).
The program clearly isn’t going to replace “real” screen capture tools, and if you need to grab freehand regions or want to be able to edit a grab then Purrint will leave you seriously underwhelmed.
If you simply want an easier way to save full screen or individual window captures, though, Purrint will do the job very well, and its configuration options and lightweight nature mean the program definitely needs a closer look.
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