A tiny yet mighty, 100 % free snapshot & screen-recorder that ships with a toolbox big enough to solve almost any capture task—strongly recommended.
What is ShareX?
ShareX is a free Windows utility that began life as a minimalist screenshot app. After years of steady updates it now handles still captures, screen recording, auto water-marking, OCR text recognition and more, all triggered by user-defined hot-keys. Microsoft crowned it Best App of 2022 in the Microsoft Store; the current build is 14.1.0.
Feature highlights
- Super-light: the installer weighs only ~7 MB
- Multi-region snapshots and seamless scrolling capture
- Screen recorder plus file-sharing tools
- Built-in gadgets: color picker, on-screen ruler, image editor, image splitter/merger, thumbnail maker, video thumbnailer, video converter, QR generator, monitor test, etc.
- Auto water-mark and drop-shadow
- Upload to 50+ image/file hosts, e-mail or your own cloud via custom scripts
- Fully customisable global hot-keys
- New: on-board OCR text extraction
Using ShareX
WeChat or Windows Snip is fine for a quick grab, but the moment you need a scrolling web page or a timed multi-monitor capture they fall over. ShareX covers every scenario—launch it, glance at the hot-key list, fire off the combination and the shot lands in the internal gallery ready for tagging, editing or re-touching. A real productivity booster.
Real-world example: I write on a Mac but needed Windows-only UI grabs for this article. I shot them on a second PC and, thanks to ShareX’s LAN upload preset, the files appeared on the Mac instantly—perfect for tech writers.
Pair ShareX with ffmpeg (one-click download prompt) and you also get high-quality screen recordings plus OCR on any portion of the screen—handy for quick how-to videos or extracting text from blocked PDFs.
All of the above in a 7 MB footprint—hard to beat.
License
ShareX is not only freeware and ad-free; its full source code is published under GPL 3.0. Use it, study it, fork it, redistribute it—no strings attached.