What is Snippy?
How often have you carefully selected some text from a Web page and copied it to an email message? Snippy makes this a snap! Simply click on the little Snippy icon in the taskbar notification area, and mark out the region of the screen that you want to copy — that's it, you're done! The cut-out image will now be in your clipboard, and you can paste it in another application.
If you are cutting out a portion of an Internet Explorer window, the URL will also be copied to the clipboard; this makes it very convenient to select something interesting on a Web site and send it out in an email message.
Using Snippy
Click on the Snippy icon – mouse cursor changes to a pen – mark an area of the screen – the marked area is now in your clipboard.
If you want to select a rectangular area, just hold down the Shift key while dragging. You can configure some things like the color of the border and so on by right-clicking on the Snippy icon in the taskbar. One of the things you can do here is to set a keyboard hotkey for activating the capture mode.
Snippy also supports multiple monitors. If you have a dual-mon set up, you can use Snippy to grab images off either or both monitors.
Installing Snippy
There is no install program. Snippy is a very small program; just 84 KB. Simply save the Snippy executable in some convenient location on your hard-drive. We also recommend that you add a shortcut to your Startup folder so that Snippy starts up automatically when you turn on your computer.
Snippy works only with Windows XP. Actually that's not exactly right — Snippy will work with older versions of Windows as well, if it has the GDI+ installed. Windows XP has GDI+ pre-installed, but Microsoft also provides a redistributable version of GDI+ that you can install if you are running Windows 2000, or (gasp!) Windows 98 or ME.
Caveats
- Note that the screen region is copied as an image and not as text, even if the area that you've marked contains only text.
- The feature to grab URLs works only with Internet Explorer currently.
- Snippy may not initially work with some applications like Microsoft PowerPoint. If so, uncheck the Include URL while copying option in the Settings dialog box and try again.
- When Snippy captures a screen region, it is saved as a temporary file which is recycled later. If you are pasting multiple cut-out regions into a single email or document, Snippy may eventually start to re-use the files before you have had a chance to save the document. In general you won't run into this problem unless you have more than 16 cut-out regions in a single email. Note that this applies only when you are copying multiple cut-outs to a single email or document; if you send out several emails in a row, each with 4 or 5 cut-outs, it will work just fine.
