How to take and annotate screenshots on Windows 10

Sometimes the easiest way to make a copy of something is to take a snapshot of your screen. While you can already capture your screen using your keyboard’s PrtScn button, you can now press Windows logo key + Shift + S to open the new modern snipping experience (also called the snipping bar), then drag the cursor over the area you want to capture.

Here are some common ways to take and annotate screenshots in Snip & Sketch on Windows 10.

Take a screenshot

Option 1: Using the Snip & Sketch app

Press the Start button and enter Snip & Sketch in the search field.

Press the New button to start snipping with the snipping bar.

The snipping bar allows you to capture the following types of snips:

Rectangular snip. Drag the cursor around an object to form a rectangle.

Free-form snip. Draw a free-form shape around an object.

Full-screen snip. Capture the entire screen.

Once you snip an area of your screen — the snipped image is added to your clipboard and you can paste it immediately in another app. A screen prompt will also allow you to annotate, save or share it using the Snip & Sketch app.

Option 2: With the Print Screen key

While the PrtScn key already captures your full screen and sends it to your clipboard, opening the snipping bar provides you with more snipping tools you can use for precise snipping. For better control of your screen capturing options, you can opt to have your PrtScn key open the new snipping bar instead of having to type Windows logo key + Shift + S.

To turn on the new snipping feature keyboard shortcut Select Start > Settings > Ease of Access > Keyboard

Option 3: With the Window logo key + Shift + S shortcut

Pressing the S key + Windows logo + Shift keys down initiates the snipping bar at any time.

Annotate snips with Snip & Sketch

Opening images for editing with Snip & Sketch

To open an image from Snip & Sketch, select Open File or drag and drop an image from apps like File Explorer or Photos in the Snip & Sketch window.

Annotating images with Snip & Sketch

Snip & Sketch provides a few tools for annotating images, namely pen, pencil and highlighter. Once you click a tool to select it, you can click it again to change its color or thickness.

The tools work better with a pen device, but they can also be used with mouse or touch if you select the Touch Writing button icon.

Use the Eraser tool to remove specific strokes or click it twice to get the option to erase all ink.

Use the ruler or protractor tools and draw straight lines or arches.

Press the ruler/protractor button again to hide the ruler/protractor

Reside or rotate the ruler/protractor by using two finger touch gestures (if the Touch Writing button is selected) or with the mouse wheel.

Use the crop tool to crop the annotated image.

To undo cropping, select the crop tool again and press Cancel to restore the image to its full original area.

Panning the view

Some of the images you annotate might be larger than the size of the Snip & Sketch window. You can use the scroll bars to pan the view, but you can also pan the view with touch input (if the Touch Writing button is not selected) or by dragging with your mouse button while holding the Ctrl key down.

Zoom in and out of screenshots to make them easier to mark up using the magnifying glass icon. You can also zoom in and out of screenshots by pressing the Ctrl key down and tapping the + or — buttons.

Sharing and saving snips

Snip & Sketch copies the annotated snip to your clipboard when you open it and every time you make edits. Snip & Sketch allows you to save the annotated image to a file, share it or open with another app, or print it on paper or to a pdf file.

Using keyboard in Snip & Sketch

While annotating is best done using a pen or mouse — Snip & Sketch provides a lot of keyboard shortcuts you can use. Access keys are activated if you press and hold the Alt key.

Use Snipping Tool to capture screenshots

Take a snapshot to copy words or images from all or part of your PC screen. Use Snipping Tool to make changes or notes, then save, and share.

Windows 10 has another screenshot app you might also like to try. When you open Snipping Tool, you’ll see an invitation and keyboard shortcut to Snip & Sketch. For more info on this app, see How to take and annotate screenshots on Windows 10.

Capture any of the following types of snips:

Draw a free-form shape around an object.

Drag the cursor around an object to form a rectangle.

Select a window, such as a dialog box, that you want to capture.

Capture the entire screen.

When you capture a snip, it’s automatically copied to the Snipping Tool window where you make changes, save, and share.

Open Snipping Tool

Select the Start button, type snipping tool in the search box on the taskbar, and then select Snipping Tool from the list of results.

For Windows 8.1 / Windows RT 8.1

Swipe in from the right edge of the screen, tap Search (or if you’re using a mouse, point to the lower-right corner of the screen, move the mouse pointer up, and then select Search), type snipping tool in the search box, and then select Snipping Tool from the list of results.

Select the Start button, then type snipping tool in the search box, and then select Snipping Tool from the list of results.

Work with your screenshots

With your Snipping Tool open, select one of the following to create and work with your screenshots.

In Snipping Tool, select Mode. In earlier versions of Windows, select the arrow next to the New button. Next, when you choose the kind of snip you want, you’ll see the whole screen change slightly to gray. Then, choosing from anything currently displayed on the screen, select the area of your screen that you want to capture.

After you open Snipping Tool, open the menu that you want to capture. For Windows 7, press the Esc key before opening the menu.

Press Ctrl + PrtScn keys. The entire screen changes to gray including the open menu.

Select Mode, or in earlier versions of Windows, select the arrow next to the New button. Select the kind of snip you want, and then select the area of the screen capture that you want to capture.

After you capture a snip, you can write or draw on or around it by selecting the Pen or Highlighter buttons. Select Eraser to remove the lines you’ve drawn.

After you capture a snip, select the Save Snip button.

In the Save As box, type a file name, location, and type, and then select Save.

When you capture a snip from a browser window and save it as an HTML file, the URL appears below the snip. To prevent the URL from appearing:

In the Snipping Tool, select the Options button.

In the Snipping Tools Options box, clear the Include URL below snips (HTML only) check box, then select OK.

After you capture a snip, select the arrow next to the Send Snip button, and then select an option from the list.

Copy from screen windows

Go to the previous, next section.

For those confined to a hardware terminal, these commands provide a cut and paste facility more powerful than those provided by most windowing systems.

( C-a [ , C-a C-[ , C-a ESC )
Enter copy/scrollback mode. This allows you to copy text from the current window and its history into the paste buffer. In this mode a vi -like full screen editor is active, with controls as outlined below.

(none)
This affects the copying of text regions with the C-a [ command. If it is set to `on’ , lines will be separated by the two character sequence `CR’ / `LF’ . Otherwise only `LF’ is used. crlf is off by default. When no parameter is given, the state is toggled.

(none)
Same as the scrollback command except that the default setting for new windows is changed. Defaults to 100.

Command: scrollback num

(none)
Set the size of the scrollback buffer for new windows to num lines. The default scrollback is 100 lines. Use C-a i to view the current setting.

(none)
This is a method of changing the keymap used for copy/history mode. The string is made up of oldchar = newchar pairs which are separated by `:’ . Example: The command markkeys h=^B:l=^F:$=^E would set some keys to be more familiar to emacs users. If your terminal sends characters, that cause you to abort copy mode, then this command may help by binding these characters to do nothing. The no-op character is `’ and is used like this: markkeys @=L=H if you do not want to use the `H’ or `L’ commands any longer. As shown in this example, multiple keys can be assigned to one function in a single statement.

h , j , k , l move the cursor line by line or column by column.

0 , ^ and $ move to the leftmost column or to the first or last non-whitespace character on the line.

H , M and L move the cursor to the leftmost column of the top, center or bottom line of the window.

+ and — move the cursor to the leftmost column of the next or previous line.

G moves to the specified absolute line (default: end of buffer). | moves to the specified absolute column.

w , b , e move the cursor word by word. C-u and C-d scroll the display up/down by the specified amount of lines while preserving the cursor position. (Default: half screenfull).

C-b and C-f move the cursor up/down a full screen.

g moves to the beginning of the buffer.

% jumps to the specified percentage of the buffer.

Note that Emacs-style movement keys can be specified by a .screenrc command. ( markkeys «h=^B:l=^F:$=^E» ) There is no simple method for a full emacs-style keymap, however, as this involves multi-character codes.

The copy range is specified by setting two marks. The text between these marks will be highlighted. Press space to set the first or second mark respectively.

Y and y can be used to mark one whole line or to mark from start of line.

W marks exactly one word.

Any command in copy mode can be prefixed with a number (by pressing digits 0. 9 ) which is taken as a repeat count. Example: C-a C-[ H 10 j 5 Y will copy lines 11 to 15 into the paste buffer.

/ vi -like search forward.

? vi -like search backward.

C-a s emacs style incremental search forward.

C-r emacs style reverse i-search.

There are, however, some keys that act differently here from in vi . Vi does not allow to yank rectangular blocks of text, but screen does. Press

c or C to set the left or right margin respectively. If no repeat count is given, both default to the current cursor position.
Example: Try this on a rather full text screen: C-a [ M 20 l SPACE c 10 l 5 j C SPACE .

This moves one to the middle line of the screen, moves in 20 columns left, marks the beginning of the paste buffer, sets the left column, moves 5 columns down, sets the right column, and then marks the end of the paste buffer. Now try:
C-a [ M 20 l SPACE 10 l 5 j SPACE

and notice the difference in the amount of text copied.

J joins lines. It toggles between 3 modes: lines separated by a newline character (012), lines glued seamless, or lines separated by a single space. Note that you can prepend the newline character with a carriage return character, by issuing a set crlf on .

v is for all the vi users who use :set numbers — it toggles the left margin between column 9 and 1.

a before the final space key turns on append mode. Thus the contents of the paste buffer will not be overwritten, but appended to.

A turns on append mode and sets a (second) mark.

> sets the (second) mark and writes the contents of the paste buffer to the screen-exchange file ( `/tmp/screen-exchange’ per default) once copy-mode is finished. See section Screen-Exchange.
This example demonstrates how to dump the whole scrollback buffer to that file:
C-a [ g SPACE G $ > .

C-g gives information about the current line and column.

@ does nothing. Absolutely nothing. Does not even exit copy mode.

Command: paste [registers [destination]]

( C-a ] , C-a C-] )
Write the (concatenated) contents of the specified registers to the stdin stream of the current window. The register `.’ is treated as the paste buffer. If no parameter is specified the user is prompted to enter a single register. The paste buffer can be filled with the copy , history and readbuf commands. Other registers can be filled with the register , readreg and paste commands. If paste is called with a second argument, the contents of the specified registers is pasted into the named destination register rather than the window. If `.’ is used as the second argument, the display’s paste buffer is the destination. Note, that paste uses a wide variety of resources: Usually both, a current window and a current display are required. But whenever a second argument is specified no current window is needed. When the source specification only contains registers (not the paste buffer) then there need not be a current display (terminal attached), as the registers are a global resource. The paste buffer exists once for every user.

Command: pastefont [state]

Tell screen to include font information in the paste buffer. The default is not to do so. This command is especially usefull for multi character fonts like kanji.

Command: slowpaste msec

(none)
Define the speed text is inserted by the paste command. If the slowpaste value is nonzero text is written character by character. screen will pause for msec milliseconds after each write to allow the application to process the input. only use slowpaste if your underlying system exposes flow control problems while pasting large amounts of text.

Command: readreg [register [filename]]

(none)
Does one of two things, dependent on number of arguments: with zero or one arguments it it duplicates the paste buffer contents into the register specified or entered at the prompt. With two arguments it reads the contents of the named file into the register, just as readbuf reads the screen-exchange file into the paste buffer. The following example will paste the system’s password file into the screen window (using register p, where a copy remains):

Command: copy_reg Copy from screen windows

(none)
Removed. Use readreg instead.

Command: ins_reg Copy from screen windows

(none)
Removed. Use paste instead.

Command: process Copy from screen windows

(none)
Stuff the contents of the specified register into the screen input queue. If no argument is given you are prompted for a register name. The text is parsed as if it had been typed in from the user’s keyboard. This command can be used to bind multiple actions to a single key.

Command: register key string

(none)
Save the specified string to the register key .

Command: stuff string

(none)
Stuff the string string in the input buffer of the current window. This is like the paste command, but with much less overhead. You cannot paste large buffers with the stuff command. It is most useful for key bindings. See section Bindkey

Command: bufferfile [exchange-file]

(none)
Change the filename used for reading and writing with the paste buffer. If the exchange-file parameter is omitted, screen reverts to the default of `/tmp/screen-exchange’ . The following example will paste the system’s password file into the screen window (using the paste buffer, where a copy remains):

( C-a )
Reads the contents of the current screen-exchange file into the paste buffer.

( C-a = )
Unlinks the screen-exchange file.

( C-a > )
Writes the contents of the paste buffer to a public accessible screen-exchange file. This is thought of as a primitive means of communication between screen users on the same host. See also C-a ESC (see section Copying).

( C-a < )
Usually users work with a shell that allows easy access to previous commands. For example, csh has the command !! to repeat the last command executed. screen provides a primitive way of recalling «the command that started . «: You just type the first letter of that command, then hit C-a < and screen tries to find a previous line that matches with the prompt character to the left of the cursor. This line is pasted into this window's input queue. Thus you have a crude command history (made up by the visible window and its scrollback buffer).