LightShot for Internet Explorer for Windows

LightShot for Internet Explorer is a fast, flexible screen capture tool that makes it easy to upload and share your captured images. It's free and works in the latest versions of IE, including IE 9.

We downloaded LightShot, which opened inside Internet Explorer. A start-up page quickly explained how to use this simple tool: click the program's feather icon to activate the selection area, drag your cursor to select an area to copy, and choose a command from a widget-style menu that appears. We clicked the feather icon on the toolbar, and our window changed appearance to indicate active selection. Using our cursor, we dragged the square selection tool over a section we wanted to capture. LightShot displayed the captured image's size in pixels. A menu appeared that let us save or copy the image or upload it to a Web-based editor and organizer, with an available Web link to the image. We could also toggle a full-screen selection or exit the tool. A pair of icons made it simple to upload images directly to Twitter and Facebook. Right-clicking the selected screen area accessed the program's commands from a menu.

LightShot's Web-based image-editing tool is certainly much more versatile than the pen feature in Windows' built-in Snipping Tool, though the Snipping Tool doesn't require an Internet connection. Both tools offer things the other doesn't; we see a need for both since LightShot is mostly designed to be an ultrafast way to capture and upload or share screen images while browsing in IE, whereas the Snipping Tool is more of a general-purpose desktop utility.