PrintScreen.Me: Extend your PrintScreen Functionality

Are you a frequent user of the PrintScreen key? Ever wanted to get more out of that button? Sure, you can paste from the PrintScreen clipboard to any image editing or annotation program of your choice, but now there is a free alternative that extends the PrintScreen button’s functionality and makes it easy to create annotated screenshots and upload them right away to an image sharing site of your work. PrintScreen.Me works in four easy steps:

1. Capture your screen with the PrintScreen button
2. Annotate, draw, and add notes to your screen capture
3. Upload screenshot directly to Facebook, Twitter, Picasaweb, Flickr, or PrintScreen.Me’s free image server.
4. E-mail, print, or archive the screen capture.

Using PrintScreen.ME

You must first download and install the PrintScreen.ME program, it is available as a free download and works with Windows machines only. Once you install the program and run it, it will prompt you for a user name and password:

You must set up an account over at PrintScreen.ME. Luckily, the only personal information that is asked for is an e-mail. If you don’t want to disclose your e-mail address, however, anything may be entered into the box, as PrintScreen.ME does not require e-mail verification. After creating your account, you will be prompted to enter your account names and passwords for photo sharing sites like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc.

The entire setup process takes less than 2 minutes. Once the program is installed, an icon should appear in the lower right (this screenshot was created with PrintScreen.ME):

Now, upon pressing the PrintScreen button you will be able to use PrintScreen.ME to edit and upload your screenshots. Here is a more detailed breakdown of PrintScreen.ME’s annotation features:

The verdict?

PrintScreen.ME is an extremely easy tool to use and comes in very useful. However, it has one huge drawback which is my reason for removing this program after using it for a day – no dual-screen support. This means that there is no way to capture the image on your second screen. It’s very upsetting that a fairly good program would not support such features, when the standard PrintScreen functionality in Windows camptures multiple monitors without a problem.

PrintScreen from Windows XP or Vista on a MAC

The new generation of Intel-powered Apple computers fully supports Windows XP and Vista through BootCamp. But, due to the fact that the MAC keyboard has less keys than that of its PC counterpart, the indispensable “Print Screen” function, which lets one take a screenshot of the screen, is no longer apparent to the average user.

In order to launch the “PrintScreen” function from a Mac running Windows XP or Windows Vista through BootCamp, including MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac Mini, or Mac Pro, you must first verify if the F1-F12 keys on your machine are controlling software or hardware features of the computer. To do this, you must first access the Keyboard tab of the “Boot Camp” icon in the Windows Control Panel and check if the “Use F1-F12 keys to control software” option is selected.

If the option is selected, then the following shortcuts must be used to perform the PrintScreen command in Windows:

Shift + F11 to capture the entire screen

Alt + Shift + F11 to take screenshot of the active window only

If the “Use F1-F12 keys to control software” option is unselected and the F1-F12 keys are used to control hardware features, then the following combination of keys is to be used to perform a printscreen:

Shift + fn + F11 to capture the entire screen

Alt + Shift + fn + F11 to capture a screenshot of the active window only

You have now emulated the PrintScreen key of a PC keyboard on your Mac!