Capture Snapshots and Screencasts with Cropper

I’ve wrote about a free screen capture software known as Cropper late last year and honestly haven’t been using it much after finding out about Jing.

But today, I’ve finally come across yet another good reason why keeping Cropper in my list of most useful program is such a good decision. Cropper is an open source C# .NET project and thus has allowed other developers to write plugins for it. The following are a few plugins that I’ve found very useful to be used with Cropper.

1. Gif Output Plugin (download)
Cropper by default doesn’t have the option to save your screenshots to GIF, but this plugin solves the problem.

2. Cropper Plugins Pack
This plugin pack features the following plugins:
– AnimatedGif – Captures to an animated GIF image.
– AviFormat – Captures to an AVI movie.
– CountdownPng – Gives you a countdown before taking the shot to allow you to set it up.
– SendToEmail – Sends the image via the default e-mail client.
– SendToFlickr – Sends captures to one’s Flickr account
– SendToOneNote – Sends captures to a page in OneNote
– SendToS3 – Sends captures to one’s Amazon S3 account
– SendToTinyPic – Sends captures to TinyPic
– TFSWorkItem – Creates a Team Foundation Server work item with the captures image as an attachment.

Now I’m not going to go through each of the plugin but the motivation behind writing this post actually came after finding out about the AnimatedGif plugin. I was initially looking for a utility to do screencasting but ended up finding out a plugin for Cropper. Jing does record screencasts but leaves a trademark/logo at the end of a screencast which I’m quite annoyed of which leads me to look for something better.

Animated GIF Looks Cool TOO!
To see why I’m excited about this particular plugin, just look at the picture below.

That’s essentially just an animated gif file! This is really a time saver especially for those who just want to record a series of on-screen-action and send it others or show it on your website. There’s no need for SWF, AVI, clumsy embeding whatever as it’s simply an animated gif file. Can you call that a screencast? Absolutely!

And if you really want to make an AVI, the AVIFormat plugin (from the plugin pack mentioned above) can also help you handle that. I’m yet to find a SWF plugin for cropper, so if anyone finds one, please let me know 🙂