TOOL OF THE MONTH

SnagIt 9 Nabs Attention
by Jessica Dolcourt

Many users have always liked the top-rated
screen-capture program SnagIt. When you need
functionality beyond the standard Windows
PrintScreen (or Alt+PrintScreen), SnagIt has been a
reliable, flexible, and powerful solution for many
years.

Though SnagIt has been a long-treasured workhorse,
the latest Version 9 update takes the feature set
well past screen capturing, with new image-management
features like handling multiple open documents, an
integrated and persistent search box, and image tagging.
This program is from TechSmith, the publisher that also
brought to market the top-rated Camtasia Studio.

SnagIt 9 makes sceen shots as glamorous as they'll
get, letting you capture any part of your screen,
from a partial image to the entire contents of a
scrolling window. You can grab images of Web sites
and software applications or pictures from scanners
and digital cameras. You even can capture video and
record screen action in AVI format.

Version 9 completely overhauls the interface to
bring the wide range of editing tools and effects
to the surface with a simplified, icon-oriented
menu structure that makes SnagIt even more flexible
and easy to use. Tools to draw, resize, recolor and
annotate the images are there, as is a menu to add
rollover hotspots for linking an image to a URL.

SnagIt 9 also adds automatic image-tagging, a
library for saving and indexing every capture and
an image tray for getting to the most recent opened
captures. Balloon tips, wizards, and an online
video tutorial make it simple for beginners, and its
sophisticated capabilities will satisfy
advanced users.

Associate Editor Jessica Dolcourt is a tough critic
to impress, but this latest version of SnagIt has
already found a soft spot on her PC. Check out her
reasons to love the new SnagIt 9 feature, which
includes a video walkthrough of the new release.

Reasons to love the new SnagIt 9
SnagIt 9 is a familiar, intuitive, and much more
varnished capture utility whose image editor has
finally come of age.

A well-stocked catalog
No longer must you recapture images you didn't
perfectly edit the first time around. With the
new Open Captures tray, a ribbon along the screen
bottom, SnagIt matures from a screen grabber that
callously dumps any capture you didn't save into
a helpful tool keeping track of all your images,
including those unsaved files. You'll be able to
jump from one open image to another to interact
with images at any time for editing, saving in a
new file-type and exporting.

Tagging
Like e-mails, images contain information,
relevance and nuance. SnagIt 9 introduces tagging
in the library pane and the menu navigation that
uses a combination of flagging, autotagging and
keyword entry to assign searchable tags to an
image. Flag categories include important,
follow-up, personal, finance, and funny. Captures
are also tagged by URL if they're taken from a Web
site, by the name of the application you may have
grabbed it from and by a manually entered keyword.

Search
SnagIt's user scenario is to store every capture
you've taken in the application's lifespan. After
a couple hundred captures, browsing through tags
gets old and inefficient. A search engine
integrated into the library pane pulls up relevant
tags and dates. Clicking the folder icon at the
bottom right of the screen helps organize the
findings with more granularity--you'll be able to
sort by name, size, dimension, flags, and keyword
and display image clips instead of the usual
text-chunky file names.

video walkthrough

License: Free to try; $49.95 to buy

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