Using Capture to Record Your Work

If you write tutorials and need to take screenshots of dialogue boxes and menus as you work you can use Print Screen or Alter Print Screen, but each time you have to interrupt your work flow to switch to Irfan View, paste the image, and save it.

1. Select Capture from the Options menu (or press C) to open the dialogue box on the right.

2. Choose the capture area you want, the Hot key, and check the box to capture the mouse cursor if you wish.

3. Instead of the default, which shows the captured image immediately in Irfan View, select the option to "Save captured image as file."

4. As soon as you click Start, Irfan View will minimize to the taskbar.

Browse to the destination directory where you wish to save the snapshots — I created one just for this purpose — and choose the file format and image options for the saved images. For PNG one can choose from "Save Transparent colour" and "Use PNGOUT plugin." I clear both of these as neither are needed for dialogue boxes.

For screen shots, GIF or PNG are best, JPG images of screen shots tend to be blurred unless they are very high quality. PNG images of screenshots are often surprisingly small. You can later reduce the number of colours to 256 to reduce file size further, or you can use the PNGOUT filter to optimize compression without losing any data.

5. Each time you want to save an image of the screen, press the hot key. Irfan View will beep and save the image to the destination directory. The files can be named with the current date and time, as in the Explorer window to the right. You thus have a record of exactly how long each stage of your project took to complete. You can also choose sequential file naming.

6. Here I used Irfan View's batch renaming feature to give shorter and more appropriate names. I used the option to  "Rename original input file."