Google shuts down Chrome ‘apps’ section on Mac and Windows Way back in August 2016, Google announced that it would be shuttering the apps section in the Chrome Web Store.
Full Page Screen Capture To start off detailing my first impressions and digital unboxing experiences, I first need a good screencap program. Usually I just use “print screen” & Photoshop, but this gets tedious for walk throughs.
I’ll be showcasing 5 Chrome Screen Capturing Extensions here with cross comparable scoring. The five chosen will be Blipshot, Full Page Screen Capture, FireShot, Lightshot & Nimbus Screenshot.
Right off the bat, they all operate the same way- their integration into Chrome allows them to control what Chrome shows you which makes for easy use & consistent image quality across all apps. The walk throughs will be shown with Photoshop for consistency.
Blipshot
Blipshot calls itself a one click, screen capturing extension. The only thing 100% true about that is that it is an extension.
To screen grab, you click the Blipshot icon, wait for it to say grab & then done. This worked sometimes. I ran into issues on a few sites that the “grab” function would not load and there were no prompts when the app failed to work.
Example: Facebook. Blipshot does not work on infinite scroll sites like Pinterest or Facebook. As this extension keeps trying to find the footer of page to indicate when to stop capturing, it keeps scrolling ad infinitum and pasting the same header on top. All these screen caps have to be saved individually and to make it more painful, there’s no easy way to terminate this process.
If you never visit infinite scroll sites, Blipshot works fine. Basic capabilities- once it loads the image you can drag & drop the file to your destination. Final score:
Full Page Screen Capture
Full Page Screen Capture (FPSC) is the most similar to Blipshot, but handles infinite scroll marginally better. With a pacman loading/instruction blurb, it gets half a star more than Blipshot.
Tested on Facebook, FPSC does make all the shots into one tiled image. A poorly tiled image, but at least it’s all one file?
After reviewing Blipshot, this one was better than I was expecting.
FireShot
After downloading FireShot, an introduction tab opens up with a run down. Helpful!
The options, built in hotkeys, & settings give the most flexible screen capturing experience thus far.
And infinite scroll? Handles like a dream. It scrolls a good amount and I’m impressed with the clean, final page.
In all honesty, in app editing is not an appeal for me. I’d much rather edit in PS to have more control over layers, but I can see how it would be handy if you want to make quick notes directly on the screen.
Lightshot
Lightshot appears to be the easiest to use with all the extras like in app editing.
Until you realize you are limited to what you see. It can technically handle infinite scrolling sites (as in it doesn’t crash), & limits your file type to pngs.
Lightshot marginally squeaks by in the instruction category & infinite scroll, but yes, it is easy to use & doesn’t crash.
Nimbus Screenshot
All of these apps have been straight forward, but a clean landing page is always appreciated.
The accompanying icons here help quick workflow. It has all the options of the other extensions but executes them the best. It handles infinite scroll the same way FireShot does.
Nimbus has the most complete in app editing features.
The only drawback I could find (which could be a major deterrent) is Nimbus only supports png image file saving.
