Free Alternative to SnagIt for Firefox
Posted by Greg Bulmash in Gadgets & Gizmos, tags: free softwareA friend of mine recently tweeted about how much he loves SnagIt. I've used it in the past, mostly at jobs where I didn't have to pay for it, but its $50 price tag combined with the fact that I don't often need to screen capture long pages or documents meant I never picked up a copy for use on my own systems.
Pearl Crescent Page Saver works much like SnagIt. It will generate a JPG or PNG format image of any web page you view in Firefox. It offers a handy-dandy camera icon it puts up in your Firefox toolbar. Just click it and you can capture the page. You also have options you can set like the default format, whether it should capture the whole page or just the visible part, whether it should ask for a file name and destination directory, and you can set a hot key if you're more keyboard oriented than mouse oriented.
It doesn't capture everything. It captures whatever frame is playing in a flash video just fine (i.e. YouTube), but when I tried it with a java applet, the applet's area was blank.
To the left is a small subsection of a capture of my most recent blog post before this. Click it to see the full image (though I shrunk it down to 300 pixels wide because the original image was very big). Now it's not as fully-featured as SnagIt or even their own "pro" version. But if all you need to do is occasionally capture a web page that runs longer than your screen, it's perfect and it's free.
Download Pearl Crescent Page Saver here.
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I have been enjoying the Evernote webclipper (and all of the Evernote tools) since I started school last Fall. besides capturing web content, it synchs with my iphone, laptop, desktop and the school machines. I love it!
Is the webclipper similar to Snagit?
SnagIt and Page Saver are screen capture tools (capture to a graphic) which I primarily use for capturing content that's bigger than the screen.
Turns out my friend's reason for loving SnagIt was not the ability to capture long pages, but some built-in image editing tools to help you do quick edits to the screen areas you just captured. It allows him to quickly slap his logo on any screen grabs he does with a minimum of clicks. If you do as many screen caps a month as he does, the time savings of those built-in editing tools make the purchase price worthwhile.
If you're like me, needing to grap a picture of a long web page once in a blue moon, Page Saver is still your best choice.
If you need to grab bits of web pages, make notes, and have them available from a central repository, it looks like Evernote would probably be a good bet.