ShareX is a screenshot tool created to make taking screenshots more efficient. Another alternative is lightshot, however I believe ShareX is a greater tool with better personalization.

Installation

  1. Go to https://getsharex.com/ . You should be directed to a home page that looks like this.

2. Click the download button. A setup file should appear at the bottom of your browser.

The download button is located near the top. There is also a downloads sub-category if you would like to download previous versions!
Here’s the setup file.

3. Open the setup file by clicking the file, or right click and hit “open”.

4. You will now be prompted to go through the very simple installation process. Go through the steps instructed on the screen, and you’ll have ShareX downloaded in seconds!

Getting to know ShareX

ShareX should pop up on your screen. If not, it may be minimized in the background. To open the application, left click the arrow on the right of your taskbar. This should open your minimized application tray, where you’ll see ShareX.

There it is! Top row in the middle.

Right click the ShareX icon. You’ll see a tray pop up with many ready to go options such as screen shot, record, create gifs, and more. We’re going to click open main window.

Here’s the homepage for ShareX. In the middle, you can see some key hotkeys that can be used to do different things The most useful one in my opinion, is capture region.

Capture Region

Capture region allows you to select a portion of your screen to screenshot. That way, you don’t have to crop the picture later after you’ve taken it!

Screen Recording

Screen recording… is rather straight forward. ShareX will prompt you to select a portion of the screen you would like to record, and it will start recording! To stop recording, press the assigned hotkey again, or click the stop button underneath the region you are recording.

Screen Recording (GIF)

Recording a gif with ShareX works the exact same way as normal screen recording, except… it will be turned into a gif file.

After Capture Tasks

If you use ShareX and take a screenshot, there are a few things you can tell ShareX to do after you’ve taken the screenshot. To check out your options, on the side bar of the application you will see a subheader called After Capture tasks. Clicking it will open up this menu with a list of the many things you can tell ShareX to do after screenshotting.

Right now, I have Copy Image to Clipboard, and Save Image to File toggled on. This means ShareX will save my screenshot as a file within my screenshot folder, and it will also copy the image to my clipboard so that I can simply paste the picture wherever I want to share it!

After Upload Tasks

After taking a screenshot, video, or gif with ShareX, you can tell ShareX to upload the file to an online host. These hosts such as imgur, pastebin, streamable host your file so that you can share it easily with others. All you have to do is copy the link to your file on their site, and send it!

1. To do this, you’ll first want to start by sending your file to a host. Click the Destinations subheader on the sidebar. A menu will pop up with the current hosts that ShareX will send each type of file to. Change them as you wish!

If you want ShareX to upload the file to a host with your own account for that host, click on Destination Settings. EX: i want to upload to imgur with my imgur account, Im going to hit destination settings and log in to imgur from there!

2. After choosing your hosts, you want to go to After Upload Tasks in the sidebar and click Copy URL to clipboard. This copies the link to your file, on the hosts website.

There are also a few more options. Play around with them.

3. Now ShareX will upload any videos or files to the host, and copy the link. But it won’t work for images just yet. To get this to work with images, go to After Capture Tasks and hit Upload Image to Host.

By default, ShareX does not send an image to a host because the image will be on your computer regardless. That’s why you need to change it!

And these are the basics to ShareX. There’s a lot more in this program, so explore!