There must be over a thousand screen capture/clipboard manager programs out there today, free, commercial and otherwise. All of them that I’ve tried so far have one similarity: They all work on a one-at-a-time basis when it comes to binary. In other words, you take a screen capture, but you then must do editing work to it while it is still in the clipboard and before you can move along to another. I had a unique requirement; I needed a program that could take rapid fire captures, if needed, with nothing more than taps on the Print Screen key. This requirement came from the backgrounds collection that I’ve been working on for several years. This collection consists solely of crops from captures of my screen saver. The problem with the one-at-a-time approach is that I had to interrupt the screen saver to edit a single capture, something I didn’t like to do if the screen saver was in the middle of generating some interesting images.

As it turned out, the solution was already on my computer and right under my nose: Google’s Picasa. As long as Picasa is running (duh) and not minimized, I can go crazy with the Print Screen key and all screen captures will be instantly saved to My Pictures/Picasa/Screen Captures in My Documents as .bmp files for editing at my leisure. And trust me, I am a man of leisure.