Ashampoo Snap 11 Review

Ashampoo Snap provides all the tools you need to capture and edit screenshots and videos, and is great value

Ashampoo Snap 11 Review

Top Ten Reviews Verdict

Ashampoo Snap's wide feature set and low price make it our best value pick for screen capture software.

Pros

  • +

    Great toolbar features

  • +

    Very easy to use

  • +

    Free for non-commercial use

Cons

  • -

    Limited video export options

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Ashampoo Snap provides all the tools you need to capture and edit screenshots and videos. These tools plus a price tag under $20 makes it one of our top picks among the best screen capture software right now. This program is very easy to use. You work it through a desktop toolbar, which assists in quickly recording videos or taking screen shots without having to open the program first. When you move your mouse to the top of the screen, the toolbar appears, and you can capture screen shots and video in just a few clicks.

Ashampoo Snap 11 Review: Ease Of Use

Ashampoo offers instructions that walk you through the system. Although this can be very helpful in the beginning as you are learning how to use the software, it can become a nuisance over time. The instructions pop up in a window that covers a large portion of the screen, and you have to click through several pages to close the window. You can dismiss these instructions and keep them from popping up in the future. That being said, it’s much better for a program to offer instructions that are too extensive than offer no help at all.

You can begin a screen capture with either a fixed or free-size region. The free-size option includes rectangles, ellipses, circles and free-hand shapes. You also have the ability to capture whole websites through Windows Explorer and Google Chrome. In the Firefox browser, you can capture whole websites as they scroll down the screen.

Ashampoo Snap interface and effects

(Image credit: Ashampoo)

The image editing tools in this program are quite good. You can use Ashampoo Snap to rotate, crop, resize your screen captures. Additionally, you can add drop shadows, apply borders, fades and watermarks. Adding text, highlights and shapes is also quite easy and will enhance your images.

As good as the image editing tools are, you don’t get everything. Advanced features found in Snagit that you don’t get in this program include grabbing text from images, preprogrammed themes and magic wand selector.

However, like Snagit, video editing abilities are limited to trimming footage. If you need a more comprehensive video editing solution, check out our review of the best video editing software.

Ashampoo Snap 11 Review: Exporting

Once you’re ready to export your videos or screenshots, you can save them in some of the most popular formats, including JPG, PNG and PDF. You can also save your screen recordings in WMV and AVI formats. Which is good as far as it goes, but these formats aren’t nearly as accepted or compatible as MP4, which you cannot create with Ashampoo Snap.

Another great feature Ashampoo Snap offers is the ability to upload screen captures to Facebook directly from the program. This is a necessity if you want to share your screenshots and videos with your friends and followers quickly.

The time-lapse feature is one that makes Ashampoo stand out. When you apply the effect to videos or still images, Snap turns them into time-lapse videos. This can be great for educational or business purposes, especially if you are showing things like the construction of a building or the growth of a plant. This is similar to using the timer feature to record a single screenshot every couple of seconds.

Should you buy Ashampoo Snap 11?

Ashampoo Snap is a great screen capture software option. The program makes it easy to capture images and video from your computer. The interface is simple with plenty of tools lining both sides of the capture screen, making it easy to navigate. And at less than half the price of our top choice, it’s our best value pick for this category.

J.D. Chadwick
Contributor

J.D. Chadwick started writing articles for Top Ten Reviews 2008 and, after filling the role of Multimedia Editor, the keen video creator and expert in software was one of the most prolific members of the TTR team, authoring articles on things like antivirus software, video editing apps, and more.