Automatic Screenshotter

[webfork]

I spent some time years ago looking for an automatic screenshot tool that would remove duplicates. The idea here is that sometimes you want to record your screen and all the changes that happen on it either for testing, documentation, or training. It's the best kind of screen recording when combined with a presentation program because each screencap has perfect quality.

I worked out something with ShareX and SFK to delete duplicates (discussed here), but I still had to manually delete a lot of unnecessary extras such as unimportant/private apps, blinking cursors, or cursor movement. This program addresses all those issues and more automatically. It will even autoselect between PNG and JPEG files based on size.

The project is from Mouser, who has built multiple programs featured here on the site (most notably Screenshot Captor) ...

Automatic Screenshotter is a tool that lives down in your system tray and takes regular screenshots of your desk or the active window.

The intention is to be a fairly lightweight primitive "backup" tool, like an airplane black box, so that in a case of last resort (app or system crash) you can go back and see what was on your screen at a certain time in the past. Future versions may expand to perform more general purpose automatic-screenshotting for folks who want to keep a complete history of what they were doing over time, etc.

Resources:

Disk: 13M, RAM: 3M

Websites:

https://www.donationcoder.com/software/ ... eenshotter
https://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedi ... tter.shtml

License: Registerware for personal use; a license key must be obtained from DonationCoder (either by donating or by registering in their forums for free) to remove the nag message.

Status: Portable, writes to AutomaticScreenshotter.ini

Screenshots:
(This is animated for browsers other than IE and Edge.)



As a sidenote, this program allows variable memory usage setting which lets you use more or less RAM to adapt to responsiveness. I'd like to see more programs with that functionality just in general.

[webfork]

Update: although this program was made primarily for software testing, I've been using it to capture low-activity screencasts. So for example, if you're watching a Skype or WebEx presentation that doesn't change much (usually PowerPoint or a program mockup), you don't need to record the entire thing (often creating 100 meg+ videos), just maybe two dozen images.

This has already saved me a huge amount of time and energy.