Snipping Tool lets you capture your screen and save the screenshots in your local drive or cloud storages, or upload them to Imgur for sharing. It can be integrated with some browsers, supports keyboard shortcuts for quick captures, and provides a few editing features.

If you take a look at it, Snipping Tool looks good, but it is actually full of annoyances. The reason is because it will keep bombarding you with upgrade notifications. And if you don’t want to see the ads that keep popping up from time to time, you have to allow BrightData to use your computer resources to download the so-called public data from the internet.

Features and Highlights

Screen capture software typically reside in the notification area during the operation, so does Snipping Tool. It has a plus icon in white color on a blue background which makes it easily noticeable.

A left click on it will dim the screen and change the cursor appearance to a rather big plus icon. To take a screenshot, drag the cursor around the area of the screen that you need to capture. Full screen capture is supported if you need to capture everything you see on the screen. There is a keyboard shortcut to perform the capture but it cannot be changed.

Once a screenshot has been taken, you can annotate it with arrows, lines, text, circle, or rectangle. Important areas can be highlighted.

Snipping Tool can blur any part of the screenshot that you need to hide, but it is a pro feature so free users won’t be able to use it. If you blur your screenshot very often, and if you aren’t willing to upgrade Snipping Tool, there are other alternatives that provide the blur functionality without demanding you to pay even a single dime.

When it is running, Snipping Tool consumes around 133 MB memory. For a software that offers few features, the memory consumption is too high. Combined with the lack of portability and keyboard shortcut customization, there is little to no reason to use this screen capture software.

There is nothing unique about Snipping Tool. Its editing panel resembles that of Lightshot and its pro features are available for free in ShareX: automatic watermark, video and GIF recording, OCR, blurring, scrolling capture, uploading screenshots to web, etc. It doesn’t make sense to pay for features that you can get for free from other software.

Snipping Tool Free Download for Windows

Snipping Tool is marketed as a free screen capture, but there are hidden pro features that will trigger upgrade notifications when you try to use any of them. On top of that, the notifications also appear very frequently when you save the screenshots that eventually you will probably fed up with it. And don’t forget about the BrightData offer.

ShareX, Greenshot, and Lightshot are way much better than this Snipping Tool and they are completely free without a catch. Still, if you’re willing to give it a shot for some reason, you can click the link below to download Snipping Tool for Windows: