When working for random people ((sometime referred to as “customers” – treat them with respect, they might pay you someday)) you’ll often find yourself in situations where others want to actually see what you were doing to whole day long. Even more often, you’ll need to explain some design-related detail to someone who is not sitting right next to you ((these people are also called “customers”)) and you’ll need to capture your screen for visualisation (since showing stuff is a whole lot easier than explaining it).

In these cases you’ll have to take a screen shot (either with the build in functionality of your OS or with a specialized programm), edit it with your favourite graphics program (eg. remove your browser chrome, annotate the image, crop the parts you need etc.) and load to your web space or attach it to an email (you’ll probably have to save it temporarily to your desktop, fire up your ftp/mail application…) . This can be quite time consuming. Well, not any more.

If your using (or at least have access to) Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 and need to take screen shots ones in a while I highly recommend using Fireshot.

Check out these Screenshots made with Fireshot to see what I mean:

Making these by hand could have cost me easily ten minutes each, but with Fireshot I made them in just a few seconds! This can seriously increase your productivity if you’re working with screen shots regularly.