I capture tons of screenshots everyday for software documentation. The
shots do not need to be hi-res, as they are for internal use only.
Each document contains hundreds of screenshots but I need to keep the
document sizes as low as possible for ease in emailing.
What can I do to ensure my screenshots take as little space as
possible? I currently use Ctrl+Alt+PrtSc as well as a utility called
ScreenHunter.
Also, I do not want to add more steps to my process, ie pasting the
shots into another app, converting and saving them. That takes too
much time.
Thanks in advance.

 
What

Hi

I would recomend looking at Snagit (http://techsmith.com/snagit.asp)
as this can be useful.
With this progrma you can program different key's to perform tasks of your liking.
Download the trial, and see if it matches your demands.

Here are a couple others for your consideration.  They are both free applications.

http://www.ntwind.com/software/winsnap.html
http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/articles/Cropper.aspx

Hi,
Microsoft OneNote is the perfect application for this. When this is
installed you can press the windows key and s and this will fade the
screen out. You can then drag an area out to take a screenshot which
is then automatically placed into OneNote. You can then move this
image between applications-hope this answers your question! You may be
able to change the resolution but not sure- will get back to you on
the possibility of changing the size of the screen capture!

Thanks, jaybf-ga.
Winsnap is great, but the screenshots are not as light as what I'm
currently using. It has a couple funtions that I'm very jealous of,
but ultimately it's not going to work for me.
I tried Cropper as well but couldn't get it to install. I had to
download the .NET framework (which I did twice and installed) and
Cropper still wouldn't execute the install.
So I'm still using my handy ScreenHunter and hoping someone will come
back with something else I can try.
Thanks also to crazywolf-ga and s1006-ga, but it's got to be a
freeware utility. The programs you guys suggested are really
formidable; I'm looking for something small that runs in the
background and doesn't use much memory.

in winsnap you can scale the size of the resulting image by dimensions
Xpixels by Xpixels or by percentage of the original size, you can also
set the quality of the image(if you use jpeg as the file format) to
reduce the weight of the image.  These settings are accessible by
going to the options menu and selecting settings or clicking the [f2]
key on your keyboard.  on the main screen you activate these settings
by checking the related checkbox in the "misc" settings area at the
bottom of the screen.  You can select a default graphic format,
automatically add a watermark, and much more and it doesn't really
take up that much memory.

You can capture images using the following keystrokes:

crtl + 1 => Full Screen
crtl + 2 => Application
crtl + 3 => Window
crtl + 4 => Client Area
crtl + 5 => Popup Menu
crtl + 6 => Region

Why dont you try screenrip? it's a freeware n has almost all the
features that you ask for. it can grab screen areas, active window,
window client, custom sized areas etc. n also has the option of
setting the image quality while saving

try this site http://www.progency.com/

You can use another tool named HyperSnap-DX, it can reduce more steps
to your process.
The software can download at :
http://www.computerbase.de/downloads/software/bildbearbeitung/hypersnap-dx/

You can try it .In the software's menus,the 'option' have many choices
,they are yours.

dwareham-ga,

Maybe you'll like AnalogX Capture? It's light, quick and has options
for autosave to file, screen or window, autoname file, etc.

AnalogX Capture
http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/system/capture.htm

- Hammer

You might want to check out ScreenShot Captor. The ScreenShot Captor
Screencapture utility is better than store bought software. It has
many features that let you resize and format images with shading,
backgrounds, etc. It has border, text and shadow effects as well as an
auto renamer. It can can capture pages longer than your screen and
grab text from dialog boxes and error messages. This is a great
program for many things beyond a simple screen capture.

 Screenshot Captor  is a program for taking screenshots on your
computer. It's different from other screenshot utilis in several
notable ways:

    * Optimized for taking lots of screenshots with minimal intervention.
    * Smart autonaming of files, and ability to embed textual comments in files.
    * Good multi-monitor support.
    * Highly configurable to make it work the way you want it to;
stays out of your way in the system tray.
    * Lots of capture modes: Multimon (multiple monitors), Desktop,
Active Window, Region, Windows Object. Each mode has a hotkey for
quick access.
    * Unique Cool Effects, including automatic active window
enhancement (see pictures below).
    * Unsurpassed support for 3rd party user configurable tools,
including file browsers and image editors; extend the program to do
whatever you need by interfacing it with other programs.
    * Slimline sidebar file browser provides full shell operations.
    * Optional automatic image file versioning.
    * Seamless integration with Unicode Image Maker tool.
    * - Autoscroll capture for windows too big for screen.
    * - Deluxe thumbnail maker.
    * - Text scraper - grab text from dialog boxes and error messages.
    * - Quick PostCapture PopUp Dialog.

http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/screenshotcaptor/index.html

1. Rather then directly copy that screen shot in the Document first
save that Imgae in the seperate Fule and then import / include that
saved file in your document.

2. Save as the Image as "JPEG" , not as "BMP" or "GIF" . JPEG is less size.