When I was working as support provider for a software company, I often had to ask the consumers to take a screenshot of the error or problem screen, so that the support engineers can understand their problems better and quicker. While the usual way to do this is to use the PrintScreen key on your keyboard, paste it in Microsoft Paint, save the file and upload it to support forums or any of the online image sharing sites like imgur. photobucket, tinypic, imageshack etc. But now I have found a better way to grab the screenshots using the free Lightshot program. Lightshot can capture screenshot using the PrintScreen key, lets you edit the captured image and allows you to upload or share it online.
Lightshot is available both as an application (for Windows and Mac) as well as a browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer. As can be guessed, the browser extension are limited to the web browsers while the Lightshot application works has no such limitation.
After you have installed the Lightshot application in Windows, it would place an icon in the system tray (notification area). Now you can either press the PrintScreen key on your keyboard or you can right-click on this notification area icon and select Take screenshot from the context-menu.
This would make your screen transparently grayish in color and change your mouse cursor into cross-hair. Now you can click and drag to select a rectangular area from your screen. You can re-adjust the selected area by dragging it or by re-sizing it. The bottom-right corner of this selected area shows you editing tools like arrows, lines, highlighters, color swatch, rectangles, text and so on. When you are done editing the image, you can upload it to cloud storage service, share it on social networks, search a similar image on Google, print it on your connected printer, copy it to clipboard or save it as an image file. It supports saving the screenshot in the JPEG, BMP or PNG image formats.
Conclusion: The Lightshot is a really lightweight screen capture program, that lets you edit the grabbed screenshots and then share them online through social networks and cloud storage services. It works flawlessly and consumes very little of the system resources.
You can download Lightshot from http://app.prntscr.com/.