Open Testware Reviews

Screen Capture Tools Survey

Reviewed: 2003-October-31
Testingfaqs.org category: Miscellaneous Tools

This survey covers screen capture tools for a wide variety of platforms. Even after culling the list, we're left with 39 entries to browse.

About screen capture tools

Screen capture tools are used to record the state of all or part of the screen. In the context of software testing, these screen shots are usually attached to bug reports as additional documentation for the state of an application that was misbehaving. There are many other uses for screen capture tools, such as adding screen shots to documentation, and producing sales demos.

Most screen capture tools record static images. The images start out as large bitmap files, and most tools can convert them to a compressed format such as gif or jpeg. It's highly preferable to use a compressed format when posting attachments to a bug tracking database, because of the large size of raw bitmap files. Some tools can record multiple screen shots as video files. Other options include recording images with a still camera, video camera, or videocassette recorder; those options aren't explored here.

Fairly common screen capture features include:

Saving either the full screen, a single window, or a selected region of the screen
Options to save in several different file formats without starting a separate program
Magnifying the captured image on the screen
Editing tools to modify and annotate the captured image

The more advanced features I saw were:

Measuring the distance between two points on the screen
Taking a snapshot based on a timer rather than immediately
Capturing non-rectangular regions (e.g., circles)
Capturing cursors, active menus, and other artifacts that are otherwise hard to capture
Stitching together images from multiple displays
Sending images directly to email or the printer
Localization to more than one language

Note that most operating systems have a screen capture feature built-in. These features tend to be fairly simplistic, and require extra work to save the image file in the format you want. The tools in this survey are designed to improve on these built-in features. On Windows, you can capture the desktop to the clipboard with the PrintScreen (or PrtSc) key, and you can capture an individual window using Alt-PrintScreen. On MacOS, there are a number of screen capture hotkey combinations, like Cmd-Ctrl-Shift-3 and Cmd-Ctrl-Shift-4, as well as the Grab application. On systems running X11, such as Unix, there is the "xwd" (X-Windows dump) program, which more advanced X11 screen capture tools tend to be built on top of.

About the matrix

Most screen capture tools are binary-only, with no source code available. Open source tools are marked as such. Most tools only capture still images. Those that can capture video are identified.

Tool	Platforms	Notes
Ace WINScreen	Windows	capture circular and elliptical areas, magnifier, must buy the commercial version to be able to save compressed images
AXSoft CaptureScreen	Windows	ActiveX Control, bmp files only
CamStudio	Windows	avi format video capture of the full screen
Captura	MacOS, Windows, Linux	jpeg format, time delay option, English and Spanish
Capture (AnalogX)	Windows	bitmap file, automatically saved to disk
Capture (Levinsson)	Windows
fbgrab	Linux	open source, captures the Linux framebuffer, time delay option
Gadwin PrintScreen	Windows	can capture custom cursors, six file formats supported
!Glance	Windows	magnifier, captures menus, dialogs, and splash screens, supports bmp, gif, and jpeg formats
Grabbug	MacOS	able to capture "zoom rects"
GrabClipSave (GCS)	Windows	bmp and jpeg formats, full screen only
Grabzilla	Windows	jpeg, bmp, and gif formats
iCord	Windows	open source, avi-format video capture
ImageMagick import	Linux (Pentium/Alpha), Cygwin/Windows, MacOS 9 & 10, IRIX, Solaris 9, OS/2, VMS, AmigaDOS	open source, requires X-Windows
MWSnap	Windows	measure, magnify, bmp, jpeg, tiff, png, and gif formats, translated to 18 languages
PGUIRobot	Java code - platform independent	open source, works with Java programs only
Power Grab	Windows	bmp, jpeg, and png format, avi video capture
Screen Grab Pro	Windows	timer feature, bmp and jpeg, only saves to clipboard
ScreenGrab	Windows
ScreenHunter	Windows	bmp, jpeg, and gif format, additional features in the commercial version
ScreenPrint Gold	Windows, DOS, Citrix	bmp only, commercial version offers many additional features, web page doesn't work with Netscape
Screen Recorder	Windows	bmp or avi video, can record mouse pointer movements in the video
ScreenRip32	Windows	ico, bmp, jpeg, gif, and animated gif formats, cursor capture,
scrot	BSD, Linux	open source, stitches together images from multiple devices
Sigis Screen Capturer	Windows	open source, bmp format only
SnapClip	MacOS
SnapNDrag	MacOS	Korean, German, Japanese, English, Spanish, jpeg, png, and tiff formats
SWBCapture	Windows	bmp, jpeg, gif formats
TiLP	Linux: (x86, Alpha, Sparc), Windows, MacOS, some Unix variants	open source, takes screen shots from TI graphing calculators
Timed Screenshot	MacOS	open source, takes screen shots at regular intervals
vcsadump	Linux	open source, captures text on Linux virtual consoles and renders them in html
WatchetShot!	Windows	cropping, jpeg format
WinGrab	Windows	captures the cursor, timer feature, jpeg, png, tiff, and bmp formats, image gallery, add text to images
X-Shot 2002	Windows	German and English, bmp, jpeg, and tiff formats, timer feature, text labels
x11rec	X11 platforms	open source, video recording in mng or animated gif format
xgrabsc	X11 platforms	open source, Postscript, xwd, bitmap, pixmap, and puzzle formats
XScreenCapture	Linux	open source
xwd	X11 platforms	open source
xvidcap	X11 platforms	open source, video, xwd, ppm, png, mng, and jpeg formats