Light Shutter

Automating and timing your screenshots to check and track your daily activity is a straightforward and simple task with Light Shutter.

This free screen capture utility will take high-quality snapshots of your desktop at the time interval you specify. Alternatively, you can take a screenshot at any time using a hot key, provided that Light Shutter is running in the background. The image will be presented for editing using the program’s built-in editor, and you can save the result in any of the most widely used image file formats.

Capture timing doesn’t come any simpler than this. All you have to do is set a time interval in seconds, and Light Shutter will capture whatever is happening on your screen every time the countdown reaches zero. To make things even easier, you don’t need to open the program’s tiny interface to increase or decrease the set time interval – just click on the right or left arrows, respectively, while the program is working in the background.

Light Shutter comes with its own image editor. The functionality it offers is pretty basic, but it is more than enough to perform some slight changes in the active screenshot before saving it as a JPG, BMP, TIFF, PNG, or PNG image file. With this simple editor you can crop the image to select the area or object you would like to keep, rotate the image at 90º intervals, mirror it, or flip it either horizontally or vertically. The image editor pops up automatically every time the program takes a new screenshot, which comes both as a blessing and a curse. It is great that you don’t have to browse for your latest screenshot and open a third-party tool to edit it, but it may also become a bit of a nuisance to have to stop working every X seconds to attend the demands of yet another pop-up window, such as to decide whether you wish to save or discard the new screenshot. Having the possibility of cropping your screenshots to preserve only the area you’re interested in is, in principle, a good thing. However, it might not be necessary if we could set the program to capture, say, only the active window or a previously-defined area of the screen.

These minor drawbacks, however, do not detract from the useful functionality that this free timing screen capture software tool will add to your desktop. Its hot-key and touch-screen support makes this tool worth considering. We hope to see those other limitations being dealt with in future versions of the program, so that Light Shutter becomes the excellent app it deserves to be.