One of my favourite genealogy gadgets on my computer is the free Snipping Tool for Microsoft Windows. It can take screenshots of an open window, rectangular areas, a free-form area, or the entire screen.
I use the tool to snip newspaper articles and other screen images to save with my records and to share with close and distant relatives. I’ve snipped a family branch on my Family Tree Maker tree to show distant cousins what I have researched so far and to ask them to help me fill in the blanks.
TechGumbo produced a short video to show how easy it is to use the Snipping Tool.
Thanks to MaryAnne Bannon Robertson, one of the administrators of the Irish in Canada – Gedmatch Numbers Facebook group, for sharing this video.
Another good snipping tool is Monosnap. I use it on my Mac. You can annotate on the snip too.
Thanks for sharing.
Hi Gail!
Snipping is one of my fave tools too.
I probably use it, on average, 3x/day. I’ll even combine snipping with downloaded hi-res documents. For example, you have a census record that has a family group running over 2 sheets. I’ll download all the census files I want, copy the citations, collect them all in one (Ever)note, and then open each record large enough to read the lines I want and snip only those lines, adding those to the same note. In this way I’ll have all the relevant info in one place, including a section large enough to read easily.
I notice in the video it’s PC-based. On a Mac, it’s SHIFT+CMD+4 to get the snip tool, and SHIFT+CMD+3 to snip the entire screen.
Love your site!
Linda
Thanks for sharing the Mac tip.
If you pay attention to all the Windows 10 messages, Microsoft is planning to kill the Snipping Tool. I have not seen what if anything is planned as a replacement. I hope it is a better replacement than Photos was for Photo Viewer.
Three windows accessories are always pinned to my taskbar — the Snipping Tool, the Calculator and the Character Map. They are all essential tools for my genealogy work.
Hi Gail,
Like the reader above, I also received the message about forthcoming changes to my much-used snipping tool so being curious, I went looking for more information and I found this information from Techbits website that has an explanation of the improvements to the new version of the tool that is available to try now.
https://scls.typepad.com/techbits/2019/01/upcoming-snipping-tool-change.html