CropSquare Utility

To take screen snaps, the typical sequence of steps is to hit the print-screen button, open a graphics program, paste the screen, crop the desired area, save the cropped area, and then enjoy your little snapshot. If you happen to be documenting an online game, you may be aware at how tedious it gets when there are lots of little clips to take.

What I came up with is a little VB6 program that takes screenshots of specific areas of the screen. It takes advantage of several API calls to stay on top of other windows, remain transparent in the client area, and to capture the screen pixel-by-pixel. The window is resizable, so you only capture the area you want.

In the interest of rapidity, the program will dump the captures in a folder of your choosing, giving them quasi-unique names. That way you can take many snaps without having to deal with the clipboard.

There are alternatives on the internet that do the same thing. Many of them have more features than this program. Some of them charge for the privilege of taking clips of your screen. Others install browser toolbars or greeting card programs. You should do some searching and compare features.

Some of the things you can do with CropSquare:

The program is bundled with Miyasaka Masaru's bmp2png.exe, so the dumped files can be saved in BMP or PNG format. There is nothing else special about the program.

The source code is not available.