FastStone Capture 11.3

Windows can already take a screenshot, so the question is what FastStone Capture does that the built-in tool will not.

Scrolling web pages in one shot, text pulled out of an image with OCR, screen recording with webcam and audio, and an annotation editor that keeps your arrows editable afterwards.

What FastStone Capture Actually Does

It sits in your notification area as a small capture panel with a hotkey for each mode. You can grab a window, an object, a menu, the full screen, a freehand or fixed-size region, or a whole scrolling page.

Captures go wherever you point them: the built-in editor, the clipboard, a file, the printer, an email, an FTP server, or straight into OneNote, Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

The same program also records the screen to video, so you are not installing a second tool for that.

What It Costs, and What You Get in the Trial

FastStone Capture is shareware, not free. The trial runs for 30 days with everything unlocked, then a single-user licence is a one-time $19.95 rather than a subscription.

The developer states no adware and no spyware in the installer, which is worth something in this category.

If paying for a screenshot tool is a non-starter, skip to the free alternatives further down. There are good ones and we would rather you found the right tool than the expensive one.

The Features People Actually Pay For

Scrolling capture. Long web pages, long documents and panes without a visible scrollbar, stitched into one image. This is the feature that sells the program, and the one the Windows Snipping Tool still cannot do.

Text capture with OCR. Pull the words out of a screenshot instead of retyping them, useful for error messages and locked PDFs. It needs Windows 10 or 11.

Pin to Screen. Park a screenshot on top of every other window like a sticky note, then annotate it in place. Handy when you are copying values between two applications on one monitor.

The FSC format. Saving as .fsc keeps your callouts, arrows and step numbers as separate objects on top of the image, so you can reopen and move them next week. Every other format flattens them permanently.

Screen recorder with a real editor. It records onscreen activity plus microphone, speaker audio and webcam, on a timer if you want, then lets you trim sections, add zoom effects and annotations, and export to MP4, WMV or animated GIF.

Plus the small tools that add up: colour picker, screen magnifier, crosshair, ruler with a protractor, Screen Focus for dimming everything except the area under your pointer, and auto-capture at set intervals.

Formats It Can Save

Images go out as BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, PNG, TGA, TIFF, WebP, PDF, or the editable FSC format. Multiple captures can be combined into one image or one multi-page PDF.

Video records to MP4 or WMV, and 11.3 adds MP3 output for recording audio only. If you need to re-encode a long recording to something smaller, HandBrake handles that better than any capture tool will.

Which Download Should You Take?

• FSCaptureSetup113.zip - the normal installer, wrapped in a zip. Extract it, run the setup, done. Right for most people.
• FSCapture113.zip - the portable build. Extract to a folder or a USB stick and run it with no installation and no admin rights.

Both are the same 11.3 release. The portable one is the better choice on a work machine where you cannot install software, or if you want to try it without touching the registry.

It runs on Windows 10 and 11, supports multiple monitors, 4K and high-DPI displays, and touch input. Text capture is the only feature that needs Windows 10 or later.

Free Alternatives Worth Trying First

ShareX is the one to try before you pay for anything. It is free, open source, does scrolling capture and recording, and uploads to more than 80 destinations, though its interface asks more of you.

ScreenToGif is the better pick if you mainly make short animated GIFs for chat or documentation.

Kalmuri and Cap Screen Recorder suit people who want recording with almost no interface at all.

TechSmith Capture and Simple Screen Recorder cover the simplest cases for free.

Screenshot Captor is powerful but its last release was 2022, so treat it as legacy rather than a live option.

The rest of the category is in our screen capture section.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

If you need to share captures to a team workspace, or you want polished templates and a library that syncs, Snagit is built for that and FastStone is not.

If you only ever crop and annotate images you already have, this is the wrong kind of tool. An image viewer with a built-in editor does that job for nothing.

• FastStone Image Viewer - free, from the same developer, with a similar editor.
• IrfanView - free, tiny, and it opens practically anything.
• XnView - free for personal use, with batch conversion built in.

The tell is what you do in the first ten seconds. If you are not reaching for a hotkey, you do not need a capture program.

New in FastStone Capture 11.3

• MP3 added as an output format in the Screen Recorder, for audio-only recording.
• Copying and pasting very small images, down to 1 x 1 pixel, now works in the Editor and Draw tools.
• Fixed selection alignment when zoomed in inside the Draw tool.
• Other improvements and bug fixes.

Recent releases before this one added a border style option to the Caption tool, an "Allow very small captures" setting, Ctrl + 0 to reset zoom to 100%, three-digit step numbers, better Open and Save dialogs, Unicode filenames in email, multiple-desktop support on Windows 10 and 11, and a "Sharp YUV" quality option for WebP.

Screenshots of the interface are worth a look before you download, since the capture panel is unusual and you either like it immediately or you do not.

Quick questions

Download FastStone Capture 11.3 and try it for 30 days, or tell us how you got on if you have used it before.