SnagIt is a completely insane screen capture program

Over the years, we've reviewed bundles of bundles and sweet suites so many times, it sometimes feels like our heads are about to explode. We've reviewed office suites, graphics suites, media management suites, and even game suites. But, until now, we've never reviewed a screen capture suite.

Although the folks at TechSmith don't call SnagIt a suite, this program has so many features, they might as well. At its core is the ability to capture a screenshot, like the one in Figure A, which, coincidentally, is a screenshot of the screenshot program SnagIt, taken with SnagIt.

SnagIt is a screenshot program. But even there, TechSmith has thought this stuff through. First, SnagIt can take screenshots of pages bigger than a window. For example, let's assume you wanted to take a screenshot of an entire Web page, including all the stuff that's scrolled off screen. Set SnagIt to auto-scroll and it'll grab the entire page, causing the window to scroll, and generating a very big, very complete graphic.

Incredibly helpful feature, that.

SnagIt can also hide the cursor or show the cursor. It can take captures of menus and it has a timer feature, so you don't have to move your mouse off of what you're grabbing to grab it.

How far can you go?

But SnagIt goes way beyond basic capture. Maniacally beyond. The Joker in Arkham Asylum maniacally beyond. "When super-villains want to scare each other, they tell Joker stories." That kind of maniacally beyond.

It's as if someone said, "Let's build the best screen capture program in the world." And they did. Then that person said, "OK, so how do we put more into this thing to make it even better?" And they did. And then they did it year after year after year after year, each time cackling insanely, rubbing their hands together, and adding more and more and more features to what's basically a one-trick pony.

This isn't feature creep, it's feature diarhea. It slices, it dices. As Crazy Eddie would have said, this product is insaaaaane! We'd expect to have product with this many features when reviewing Photoshop, but not a frickin' screen capture program.

Can you possibly have too many features?

We reviewed SnagIt 8.2 and this thing does so much, it'd take me a month to write about it all. Instead, I'm just going to go down a quick bullet list of some of the features:

• Image capture: entire screen, window, active window, region, fixed region, object, menu, scrolling window, scrolling region, scrolling active window, freehand region, ellipse, rounded rectangle, triangle, polygon, clipboard, graphic file, program file, full screen DOS, Direct X, extended window, wallpaper, scanners, cameras, and Web page with links.

• Text Capture: entire screen, window, active window, region, fixed region, object, scrolling window, scrolling region, scrolling active window, clipboard, and full-screen DOS

• Video capture: entire screen, window, active window, region, and fixed region

• Web capture: all files from a Web page or Web site, files off Web pages linked to original page

• Output: Easily send captures from SnagIt, send to printer, save to Clipboard, save to file (over 23 formats, including: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, PSD, TIF, EPS, PDF), send to email, send to SnagIt Catalog, FTP to Web, send within Instant Messenger, send to an external program, multiple combination of any or all

• Organize: Manage your images all at once, catch conversion of images, view thumbnails of all captures, print multiple images, email multiple images, set images as wallpaper, navigate and manage folders quickly with Catalog, create a themed Web page of your images and screen captures with the step-by-step wizard

In addition to "basic" capture features, SnagIt includes a full editor. Those features include vector-based editing, drawing tools, highlights, frames, borders, drop shadows, edge effects (torn, faded, shark tooth, saw, beveled and wave edge), text boxes, annotations, stamps, arrows, sticky notes, interactive canvas, color adjustment (hue, saturation, gamma and more), creating and saving custom annotation shapes, eliminating unwanted areas of screen captures (crop, cut and join features), image processing (mosaic, sharpen, emboss, oilify, underlay, solarize, edge enhance and more), smooth scaling, color resolution settings, callouts, add flash hotspots with pop-ups, and more.

You want more? OK, here goes. SnagIt can also create capture profiles, schedule screen captures with time delay, import/export profiles to use on multiple computers or share with others, automatic file naming - with 19 different file name components, set individual hotkeys for each capture profile, one-click screen capture with SnagIt OneClick, three different viewing options (normal, classic, compact), include cursor in your captures, place in the toolbar of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Internet Explorer and the menu of Adobe FrameMaker, integrate SnagIt into any program that supports COM access with the COM Server.

Old doesn't mean over-the-hill

One of the reasons SnagIt does so much is it's been around so long. This product is 16 years old. It first arrived on the scene back in June of 1990. It was used internally for documentation and wasn't named SnagIt until released on CompuServe's Winshare forum. Yeah, CompuServe. Remember CompuServe? I do.

I generally don't like products with too many features. Usually, the addition of features costs in terms of smoothness of operation. Programs bulk up and get slow. In fact, we're seeing this now in our OutlookPower Magazine coverage of Outlook 2007, which has turned into a veritable disaster of an upgrade.

But, for whatever reason, SnagIt just works. The basic screen capture functionality is easy to get at and all the other features somehow generally fit. We're going to give SnagIt five stars because this is how a program is supposed to be done. In fact, if you're a developer and you're wondering why you didn't get a five-star review, take a look at SnagIt and ask yourself if your product is anywhere near as good. It's not just the bajillions of features. It's that the bajillions of features don't make it suck.

We're looking forward to version 9.0, when reliable sources tell us SnagIt will clean your bathroom and flatter your mother-in-law.

Oh, and in case I forgot to tell you, it's only $39.95. Just buy it. It's bound to have five or fifty features you'll need.