SnagIt - Why I Hate It and Yet Can't Live Without It...

I have a love hate relationship with Techsmith's SnagIt. The app does so many things very well... but there are few things which really frustrate me on a daily basis. I go searching for alternatives fairly often as a result of them. Here's my list of features which are really missing in SnagIt.

At the time of writing, The latest versions are: SnagIt 11.1 on Windows and SnagIt 2.0 on Mac.

1. Facilitate attaching images to Gmail/Web Apps

Webmail is great... but until browsers can fully access the clipboard, pasting images into a gmail window isn't going to be possible. The solution to this limitation that most webapps (gmail included) have embraced is allowing images to be "drag and dropped."

On SnagIt for windows, when you drag and drop an image from the catalog bar (the bar that shows up under the image editor), it attaches the image in the proprietary .SNAG format. Solution: create an event handler for this such that when you drag the image from the catalog it automatically saves it as a .png file in the catalog and use that copy as the image to drop.

On SnagIt for Mac, you cannot drag images out of the catalog bar at all. So, this needs to be added.

The fastest way to attach images I've found is to first do "Save as" and save as a png. Once you do that you can then drag it over and it'll attach as png. But, the additional save as step slows things down. Especially, you were trying to markup 5 images for an email. That extra save as step really adds up. So, the simple solution to this is add an event handler to detect dragging, automatically save the image as a PNG or JPG and then have that copy get "dropped" in the application instead of the .SNAG version.

2. Ability to resize everything using keyboard shortcut.

If you've ever used Balsamiq Mockups, you'll know what i'm talking about. In that app CTRL+[ makes things smaller and CTRL+] makes things bigger. For example, if you have text selected, it should make the text bigger. If you have an arrow selected, it should make the width of the arrow thicker. If you have a rectangle selected, it should make the stroke around it thicker. If you have a stamp selected, it should scale it up and down.

Having to hover over things to reveal the context menu is incredibly slow.

In SnagIt for windows, it is possible to create shortcuts for resizing the text. But, it's not possible to assign a shortcut to increase the width of an arrow unfortunately.

3. Scale Font To Fit.

When I draw a rectangle, I generally know that's the size I want it to be. I want the text I compose to be as large as possible but still fit in the area I defined. So, the default font size should be AUTO and it should resize the font to make this happen for me automagically.

The Mac version is slightly better. When you add more text then what would fit in the text area it automatically expands the shape. But, I'd prefer it to just scale the font instead because as I said earlier... Generally when I draw the shape, that's the size I want it to fit in.

4. Better Default Styles -or- Quicker Editing of Styles

If you love "Comic Sans" then you're the type of person that would like the default styles. Bad Fonts, Bad Colors, and Unprofessional shapes. This feedback applies more to the windows version. The Mac team did a much better good job of defining the styles.

The workaround to this that most people would suggest is to "Create a custom style". Well, no custom styles don't work (see below). But, if you're going to insist on it then at the very least they need to be improved in the following ways:

1. Custom Styles need to be at the top of the list... not at the bottom where I have to scroll down every time for. Alternatively, make it possible to just delete the default quick styles.
2. It should remember the last custom style used between sessions and default to this rather then the ugly default style.
3. The preview for a custom styles don't look right. They don't show my font half the time or it's hard to tell how big the arrow widths are.

Better yet! Just make it easier to change the color, size, etc. No matter how organized you are about creating quick styles, there is no substitute for being able to customize the attributes on the fly. The colors I choose are directly related to the image background / style I'm marking up... so you you simply can't create styles for every occasion. Back in SnagIt 8, life was good. The original interface was so fast and intuitive. Once they made the switch to the ribbon interface in SnagIt 9, Things got hidden in menu's which appear on hover. God forbid you want to change the font size, font, color, and say the width. That's 3 separate hover steps. I still have snagit8 installed and prefer it's editor over the ribbon style anyday!

I like the Mac Version much better because it style has a property panel (similar to how SnagIt 8 for Windows did). But, the Mac Design team made some poor decisions for this panel. For example, If i'm editing a text rectangle. They give you options to quickly edit the Line Style and Width. But, changing the Font size, type and color are buried under a separate panel. Who edits the rectangle width more often then font size? No one! So, these options should be given priority.

Make it Easier to Combine Multiple Captures.

Often I'll take several captures and want to combine them into a single display. When you try and move the second capture into the first, it should automatically expand the canvas area.

Some more nit picky feature requests...

The features above would satisfy me and I feel all are completely actionable requests. But, here's a complete feature request list.

1. On Mac, the padding between rectangle edge and the text is too high. Hard to fit everything in.
2. Mac version, doesn't have features like Trim, Cutout, Spotlight and magnify at all.
3. Windows Version, doesn't have the reflection option.
4. On Windows, would love to be able to do spotlight & Magnify on multiple areas.
5. Both Versions, would be nice to be able to create custom stamp library from multiple sources.
6. On Mac, no option to assign a keyboard shortcut to Increase/Decrease Font size at all.
7. Create styles which are proportional to image resolution. The styles are by default sized appropriately for screen captures at screen resolutions. If you ever try to markup an image from a digital camera, you'll need to increase the widths / font sizes. Make them be a percentage or scale appropriately based on source image resolution.

No better option!?

So, I've outlined a few of my biggest grips with SnagIt and all of them have to do with the built in editor. There is probably a better editor out there somewhere. But, I keep coming back to SnagIt for the following reasons. If anyone knows of a better editor that I could tie into SnagIt for editing please chime in.

1. I love how I can capture things and not have to save them. I frequently take a screen grab and then do nothing with it. I save it for later when I have time to do something with it. So, it getting captured in Snagit's catalog is the unique feature which keeps me from switching.
2. The "All in One" Capture option is incredible.
3. SnagIt is reasonably priced ($50). I use Snagit on a lot of computers so putting an Adobe Creative Suite on all of them is just cost prohibitive.
4. SnagIt is lightweight. The time to go from capture to editing is well under 2 seconds (if you have a good computer at least)... firing up an Adobe app just takes too long.
5. For the most part... everything I need is in SnagIt and it's faster and easier then more heavyweight apps.

I'd really like a better solution and would love for people to chime in on the comments and let me know what they use and if there is a better solution out there. Thanks!

Update: 1/11/2013

I evaluate some other applications.

1. Most promising to me is Clarify. It doesn't have a catalog per se but you can capture lots of images into a single book. It's intended for making a step by step instruction list. So, it allows you to put blocks of text between your screen grabs. It's a pretty good idea. I really like how they have styles. It's very easy to modify the colors widths etc.

2. Skitch - seems to be the trendy app people are using. They have very limited options. You get one font and a small color palette. But the one font looks nice, an the colors all go together.

Comments

[Craw]

The default Fonts and Shapes of SnagIT are the main reason why it's not useful for tutorial software. Sure, I can add more styles, but I have to page though all these useless and over-dramatic styles and shapes before I can find anything corporate-useful. Everything on there looks like it's for a 5th grade art project.

[Phil]

Agree with most of your points... particularly
* resize fonts etc w/keyboard or other intuitive control
* scale fonts to fit
While I like some of the new features since v8 (all in one capture) the overall usability of the interface has gone way down.

* Line Tool - one of the most frequently used tools for me, but it takes forever to get anything done.
- need the "auto-break-to-route" feature from the Mac version!
- allow me to get rid of all the cruft in the styles menu and just keep what I want - I'm basically re-setting up the styles for each image (width, colors, etc) because this menu is just not useful (see "ribbon interface" issues below)
- the "line end" features in the popups are hilariously unhelpful - because there's no indication (besides trial & error) of which menu corresponds to which end of the line. On two otherwise identical lines the menus will have opposite effects (left menu changes rightmost end, etc.) I suppose it depends on the direction in which the line was drawn?

* Why are "Lines" and "Arrows" two separate tools? Everything else about them behaves exactly the same as far as I can tell - the "Arrows " even have the same end-point style options as "Lines". So basically the only difference is that you can't put a "pointed arrow" end style on a Line. Real cute when I get to the end of that complicated line segment, and have to then switch to Arrow, and duplicate the exact settings I had for the line tool (generally involves way too many clicks in submenus, going back and forth between tools to check, losing the settings I already made, etc.)

* Quick Styles / Ribbon interface: Just Stop. Single biggest step backwards in UI design I've ever seen. Sure, I can add quick styles, that's great - but (at least 75% of the time) when I re-select the tool, they appear AT THE BOTTOM OF THE MENU, so I have to click a tiny little "expand" nubbin and then choose. So not so quick after all. And I can count on one hand the number of times I've ever used one of the pre-defined styles - whoops, too bad I can't get rid of them, guess I'm stuck with an entirely useless menu. Oh well, at least there's still my trusty frenemy, Mr. Context Menu... so excited!
I suppose it would be too much to ask to provide an option to use the old-style (v8-era) interface? I mean I'm sure there's research about how great the ribbon is, etc etc (at least I hope Microsoft etc has some scientific basis for leading the industry in an otherwise absurd charge in that direction) but it's been six years since the introduction in Office 2007 and I've yet to meet a single person who actually prefers it in ANY application. Admittedly, at this point I'm just griping about the ribbon in general rather than SnagIt in particular; it's just another of many applications I've seen ruined by that recently.

* File Management: maybe I'm just doing it wrong, or I just expect programs to screw it up, but I end up saving everything twice: I finish the image, save it as a .snag, then save it again as a .png or whatever. A few reasons for this:
- don't really trust that when I save it as a PNG it won't flatten everything... I've noticed that it stays open in the library but sometimes I accidentally close things in there and don't really trust I'll be able to get them back.
- Need to save the .snag to a shared location, not just my library, so a co-worker can edit it later, or I can update from a different PC, etc. But I don't want _just_ the .snag because I need to drop it in an email quickly, pull it up on other computers without SnagIt installed, etc.
... Basically - I just wish there was a button/option to "Save as standard format and a .snag alongside", instead of having two separate save operations.

* Misc other UI gripes:
- (removed note about Bring Forward / Send Backwards because I figured out how to set keyboard shortcuts... Not sure why the Keyboard Shortcuts menu is only accessible via "Customize Quick Access Toolbar", but...)
- text boxes: All I want is an opaque box with no drop shadow. The one that _looks_ like what I want is actually a transparent box... how unhelpful! So I select the drop-shadow box, and disable shadows. And again, defeated by quick styles!
- text boxes pt 2: All I want is to have a text box with a frickin' arrow attached to the frame. Now that would be a useful quick style. As a previous commenter mentioned there's really not much in there that's helpful for business or commercial diagrams without a hefty amount of customization... this is just one example. The closest thing I can find (without making a box, an arrow, and joining them or dealing with two separate items) is more akin to a comic book bubble.

And now the central issue: WHY IS EVERYTHING SO SLOW? I have a 3.5Ghz quad-core i7 and 16GB of RAM, yet bringing up the (over-abundant) context menus, and other simple stuff (redrawing boxes when I change font size, redrawing window when zooming/panning, drawing multiple lines one after the other, dragging or resizing a text box, to name a few) makes me feel like I'm back in the days of WinXP on an Athlon 800 with 512Mb of RAM.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think this can be a video card problem - I've seen the same issues on several generations of cards, multiple vendors, multiple OSes. And it's not a CPU issue, I'm using more or less the fastest CPU I can buy (within reason). So why is the UI still so unreasonably slow? Productivity is seriously hampered by this, to the point where SnagIt no longer becomes a useful tool. And it's only gotten worse in successive versions.
Honestly, this is the biggest sticking point for me. If everything wasn't so painfully slow I could put up with a lot of the other quirks and it would still be a good tool. But when it takes the better part of a second to switch between highlighted items - (I'd say a good 500-700mSec) - it becomes more of a chore than anything else. When I select something I can literally watch the menu fade-alpha-blend itself in, in stuttering steps. Maybe disabling the pointless alpha-blend transition would help? But even so I don't expect that would fix the issue when I switch between selections, etc...

Really hope there's some resolution ahead for this... I've basically given in to applications needing a growing amount of resources, but when a new computer / new OS doesn't help it's definitely a program issue - drop the fancy UI and just _make it run quickly_, please! If you do that (and fix quick styles - i.e. let me delete the defaults) then I'll stop complaining about the ribbon interface, I promise.