At my last job, we used Snagit exclusively for screen captures. It’s a great tool, but it’s a tad pricey for doing quick screenshots on your home machine.

Just today, I was at a new contract gig and needed to do some screenshots. There wasn’t anything decent already available so I went googling for a bit.

First up. I believe I’ve talked about Faststone Capture before and that’s one of the first hits I got. But after downloading the latest version, I discovered that they’ve gone to a paid version with a 30 day eval. Don’t get me wrong, Faststone is a good screen capture util, and you might want to give it a whirl, but in this case, I was looking for something small and free.

Next try. Struck Gold!

PicPick is a little freeware app from wiziple.net. Odd name, but for free, it’s one amazingly polished screen capture app.

Let’s see, what’s to love?

• It’s got a built in image editor for quick annotations.
• It can do full screen caps, region caps, window caps, freehand caps, you name it.
• It’s fast.
• It can save to several different image formats

and lastly…

It’s got a built in screen protractor! WTH!

If you need to do screencaps on a budget, definitely check this one out!