ScreenCapture Utility

[xbonez]

SCREEN CAPTURE​

As part of a community that overclocks and stress tests anything they possibly can, and a sub-community that Folds on anything and everything, there is one this I realized, we do a lot. And that is taking screenshots. Whether to show off our overclock, get help from others or any of the hundred other reason we need screenshots for.

The general steps taken to get a screenshot are the following:

1. Hit printscreen (or alt-printscreen)
2. Open MS Paint
3. Paste the image
4. Crop if necessary
5. Save the image

Doing this over and over again, gets really tiring. I had a little down time at work today, and decided to write a little app that makes life easier for all of us by automating as much of the process as I could.

The application has been written in C# (.NET Framework 2.0), so you will need to have .NET Framework installed to be able to use it.


The application provides the user with two options (via two buttons).
1. You may either capture your entire screen, or
2. Capture just the area covered by the application itself.

The first one is rather self-explanatory. You click the 'Capture Screen' button and you have a screenshot of your screen.

For the second, you resize the application window to cover exactly the area you want to capture, and click the 'Capture Window' button. The application window will hide itself and take a screenshot of the area it was covering.

The screenshots taken get saved as a .png file. The default location the files get saved at are C:\Screenshots. You may click on the 'Change Save Folder' and specify another directory
(Changing this to your Dropbox Public folder alleviates the need to upload the file to an imagehosting website).

I have attached the .exe as well as the Visual Studio solution, should anyone want to have a look at the code or make any changes (Feel free to do so, but give credit where it's due).

Possible changes I would like to make in the future:
1. Automatically upload image to an imagehosting website and provide user with direct link.
2. Support multiple monitors.
3. Add an icon to the Form.

 

[Completely Bonkers]

GREAT!

However, did you know that TPU Capture does this already, and it will ALSO UPLOAD the screenshot to Wizzard's server, ready to paste into the forum!

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1607/.html

IMO TPU Capture is blxxdy brilliant and one of my favourite utilities.

 

[xbonez]

GREAT!

However, did you know that TPU Capture does this already, and it will ALSO UPLOAD the screenshot to Wizzard's server, ready to paste into the forum!

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1607/.html

Lol....no. I did not. Oh well...

EDIT:
Well, one thing my app does that TPU Capture won't is cover multiple windows.

Suppose you want a pic of RealTemp, Prime95 and CPU-Z, you can cover those three windows with this app, and get a screenshot of all 3 together without having to capture the entire screen.

EDIT 2:

Nevermind. TPU Capture has a custom option. lol

 

[streetfighter 2]

Well one important difference between xbonez program and w1zzards is the availability of source code, which to me is no small benefit.

I've often thought about writing my own capture utility because I wasn't happy with other ones. I'd have to add a shell hook and code to capture D3D and openGL frames so I could take pictures in fullscreen games. I'm probably not going to bother though...

 

[W1zzard]

TPU Capture won't is cover multiple windows.

hit the print screen key and drag whatever you want to capture in the "background"

 

[xbonez]

hit the print screen key and drag whatever you want to capture in the "background"

Yup, noticed that soon after making the post (hence EDIT2).

 

[char[] rager]

I for one am for community created programs. I am checking this out now.