LittleSnapper, Skitch, and Web Snapper: Why You Still Need All Three
… or, more accurately, why I still need all three.
LittleSnapper, Skitch, and Web Snapper are all screen capture utilities for the Mac. LittleSnapper, released yesterday, is the newest of the bunch; it lets you capture and catalogue “snaps” of your screen or web pages. Skitch, which has been in public beta for over a year, lets you quickly and easily grab and share portions of your screen or entire windows. Finally, Web Snapper integrates with Safari and captures web pages, giving you the option of saving them as images or PDFs.
While all three are great products, none of the three does it all. Below is a summary of what each program excels at.
The Showdown
LittleSnapper ($39 USD) is definitely the most ambitious of the three programs and it lets you capture the most types of screenshots. You can grab your full screen, a window, an entire web page, or a specific DOM element on a web page. Once you’ve captured your screenshot, you can annotate it, sort it, tag it, and/or share it via Flickr or Realmac’s own QuickSnapper service. As a bonus, LittleSnapper has a gorgeous Mac interface.
Skitch (free public beta) doesn’t capture web pages, just your full screen, a window, or a selected area or your screen. What makes Skitch great, though, is how easily you can capture, share, and edit the images you grab. Like LittleSnapper, Skitch has annotation tools and sharing functionality via its own web service. Unlike LittleSnapper, Skitch lets you crop and resize the image without having to open an image editor (Edit: see my note below — LS can crop). This is an awesome facility for anyone posting images to a blog — it’s speedy and works well. Moreover, Skitch will automatically name your captures, but lets you easily change the name and format of the file. Where LittleSnapper has the upper hand is in its built-in ability to store and categorize the images you grab and in its web capturing abilities.
Web Snapper ($15 USD) is a tiny app that (only) lets you capture web pages exactly as you see them in Safari. You can use it by itself, dragging URLs into its interface, or via a button it adds to Safari. Web Snapper then captures the entire length of the web page — even the portion that isn’t viewable without scrolling — and saves it as an image or PDF. Where Web Snapper excels is in its Safari integration and its “Save as PDF” feature, which, as I’ve mentioned before, is nothing short of amazing. Web Snapper is definitely more of a niche product than the other two apps, but it does its job extremely well.
The Conclusion
As I said at the beginning of the article, each of these programs is great, but none of them does it all. However, if you’re a betting person, the horse I’d recommend is LittleSnapper. If you improved its PDF output to the standards of Web Snapper and added the ability to crop and resize images without having to leave the program, it would be the only screen capture program you’d need on the Mac. I dare say even SnagIt users on Windows might get jealous then.
Update: As Nik from Realmac has pointed out, you can crop images in LittleSnapper and drag the cropped image into Mail.app or onto the desktop.
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Hi there
Thanks for the post :) Just thought I’d point out that LittleSnapper does ship with cropping built in. To differentiate it from the Highlight mode, it’s accessible via the Layers menu (Cmd + K). With regards to the other features, we’re at 1.0, so understandably we’ve got a list of things we’ll be bringing to the application in the new year.
Thanks
Nik
Comment by Nik Fletcher (Realmac Software) — December 12, 2008 @ 10:48 am
Hi Nik,
Thanks for pointing out the crop tool in LittleSnapper. However, you can’t actually drag cropped images to the desktop or email, can you? At least I couldn’t seem to do it. But like you said, it’s just a 1.0 release (which I also alluded to in my comparison), and already LittleSnapper is an excellent app.
Comment by Eric — December 12, 2008 @ 11:32 am
Hi Eric
Absolutely! In the ‘Icon’ view, simply drag the image out (to desktop / Mail.app). When you’re in Edit view, hold the Option key and then drag the image out of the application for the same feature with the edited snap. There’s an application preference (“Dragging Images out will Include Annotations”) in the application’s General Preferences window that is checked by default.
Best
Nik
Comment by Nik Fletcher (Realmac Software) — December 13, 2008 @ 6:16 pm
Awesome, thanks Nik. I’ll make note of it above.
Comment by Eric — December 13, 2008 @ 9:39 pm
Hi Nik,
Dragging a cropped image from Icon view still results in the entire image getting copied to Mail or the Desktop, whether I hold the Option key or not. Holding Option and dragging from Edit view works as you described, though.
Comment by Eric — December 14, 2008 @ 9:51 am
Thx for this info-post; I’m researching more about LittleSnapper vs. Skitch (which I use) and am compelled to try the former out.
Comment by Torley — December 31, 2008 @ 3:26 pm
You can crop in Skitch by dragging the image borders.
Comment by Randy — January 7, 2009 @ 11:36 pm
@Randy: My wording was confusing; I’m aware Skitch can crop images, but I’d edited the sentence poorly when it was pointed out that LS can crop images as well.
Comment by Eric — January 7, 2009 @ 11:42 pm
Hey Eric, Great post. But have you tried Voila? That’s great application, I daresay, a combination of the above three. I have been using it for a while,and it is just great. Check out the new version here
http://www.globaldelight.com/voila
Regards, Grett
Comment by Grett — May 5, 2009 @ 11:21 pm