Pale Musings

Cropper is a nice little screen capture utility written in C#. It has a fairly nice plug-in interface allowing other developers to write extensions. An example of one that I use is the Flickr plug-in to automatically upload captures to my account. Very slick! Another plug-in also allows you to save animated GIF’s! That is one feature I have not seen in another screen capture utility.

Cropper is a fairly simple capture utility lacking some of the features of commercially available products. Another utility that I use is the FastStone Capture which has the ability to edit the captures (crop, re-size, add call-outs, etc…) before saving. That is the only feature that I can think of that I miss in Cropper to make it my full-time capture utility.

I started work on a plug-in to add the editing functionality with version 1.8 but never had time to pursue it. I ran into enough roadblocks that I shelved it. I may dig that out again to see how it may work with the enhanced plug-in interface. There are many things about Cropper that would make it a better choice, in my opinion. The keyboard ability to move the selection around is very nice.

Overall, FastStone is probably my day-to-day capture program, but I’ll be keeping an eye on Cropper. If some of those features are added I will likely switch its role to my normal capture utility rather than the one I use when I need to upload to Flickr.

UPDATE: I realized that I was using version 4.7 of FastStone Capture yet the current stable version is 5.2.  After installing it I found some great new features, including different edging options.  There is also a portable version!  I am currently using the USB menu system from portableapps.com.  I simply downloaded the FastStone Capture portable version, extracted the folder inside the zip file to the PortableApps folder (you want the folder, not just the files), refreshed the PortableApps menu and viola!  It works great!