LittleSnapper review

Command-Shift-3.

Command-Shift-4. Think they're all you need for grabbing the screen on your Mac? Think again. LittleSnapper is Mac OS X's Grab on steroids. A modest app, it's happy to sit in the background, popping up at the press of a shortcut to grab your active window, your full screen or whole web pages, no matter how far they scroll beyond the bottom of your screen. It's this last feature that's a killer for us.

It uses an integrated browser, so there's no clumsy switching backwards and forwards between LittleSnapper and Safari, Firefox or Flock, and it has borrowed Safari's button for making quick Dashboard widgets. Only here it doesn't make widgets: click on the element selection button beside the URL and roll your mouse across the page to highlight individual DOM elements. Once you click and confirm, it saves a perfectly trimmed grab of that element to your library.

The images themselves - snaps, if you prefer - are saved in LittleSnapper's iPhoto-like libraries, and organised in folders, collections and smart groups that filter their contents on the basis of your own set variables. You can sort them by date, title or URL, then edit and export them without switching to an external application. It's a blogger's dream - particularly as the integrated upload tools let you publish the results on an FTP site or your MobileMe web space.

Images can be tagged, rated and sorted, making LittleSnapper a screenshot-based asset library, and with a free subscription to QuickSnapper (quicksnapper.com) thrown in for image sharing, you have a rudimentary, native backup tool built in.

If the truth be told, we were sceptical when we first heard of LittleSnapper, but when you've lived with it for a day it easily proves its worth. Mac OS X's built-in grabbing shortcut does an acceptable job, but it's messy: it drops crud all over your Desktop and unless you're prepared to run Grab - a trial in itself as you then have to manually save the results - you lose the pointer, too.

Technical writers and bloggers take note: LittleSnapper is good.