As someone who is involved with instructional design and development and who also creates more than his fair share of presentations by day and blogging by night (ok not always at night), one of the things that I do on an almost daily basis is capture screenshots for a variety of uses. When I got started in the field, I had to go through a pretty extensive process for doing so: use the Prnt Scrn button on my keyboard which captured the screen to the Windows clipboard, open up my graphic editor of choice (typically Fireworks), create a new image, past the screen, crop and resize the image and make any necessary annotations, etc., save the image, and then import the image into what I was producing.

The whole process was not very streamlined and was full of potential areas for error. Then a few years ago, I learned about SnagIt from the TechSmith company which did much of those steps (and many more) for me. It was a tremendous time-saver and was well worth the $39.95 that I paid for it. I still use it and the entire Camtasia studio package today. For many individuals, especially those who do instructional design / development work as part of many other responsibilities, the functionality/cost may be much more than they need or are willing to spend. Sometimes all you really need is a free tool that is easy to use and gets the job done quickly, bells and whistles need not apply.

Today, Mashable posted a fantastic write-up on 15 ways to create website screenshots that I found useful and enlightening. A number of the tools listed (SnagIt, Faststone Capture, and Webshot) I was already familiar with but many more including those that are web-based or run as browser plugin’s I was not.

If you find yourself making/taking screenshots as part of your daily work or blogging activities and have been looking for a tool to make it easier, I’d highly recommend taking a look at this list. It may or may not be comprehensive, but regardless it’s a great starting point and should point you to a few great resources.