Automated Screenshots with Automatically Take Screenshots Software

Sometimes, a screenshot is all that’s necessary to show how to perform a task.  For instance, if the point of this article was to inform the reader exactly how to open the preferences of the program being used to write this article (LibreOffice), all that would be necessary is a simple screenshot, like this:

The above image shows that by clicking the Edit menu and choosing Preferences from the bottom, you would reach the preferences window.  Simple. Logical. Easy.

Other times, a screencast is a great way to show exactly how to perform some computer-related task.  You simply start your screen recorder, perform the task, and when finished, you have a video of the exact steps necessary for someone else to see, and learn, what you did.  This is better when there are multiple steps along the way, some of which might not be easy to capture in a single image.

In still other cases, what you really need is a series of screenshots, taken quickly (more quickly than you can likely do by hand).  In this case, it would be nice to have an automated tool that could do this for you.  A tool such as Automatically Take Screenshots Software, for instance.

Automatically Take Screenshots Software, although it has a lengthy and fairly unwieldy name, is actually quite simple.  It takes screenshots at whatever interval you set (from one every few hours to one per second), and saves them, using your quality preference, in the folder of your choice.  Here’s how it works.

Once you’ve loaded the website, click the Download link.

You’ll need to save the installer to somewhere on your hard drive (once launched, it will download another installer which actually installs the program).

Now, simply go through the installation process.

Note: For some reason, Automatically Take Screenshots Software wants to install Real Player, but worked perfectly well without it.  Feel free to decline the offer to install it.

Once installed, you’ll find Automatically Take Screenshots Software in your Start menu.  Once started, you’ll see this window.

Here you’ll see your basic options.  You’ll need to choose your save directory, the interval your screenshots will be taken, their quality (the program uses JPG by default, with no options to change to PNG or any other format), and whether or not it should be started when you start Windows.  Once you’ve selected your settings, take a test screenshot or begin capture.  The window will now show a countdown between images, as shown below.

If you want, while the screenshots are being taken, you can minimize Automatically Take Screenshots Software to your tray, to get it out of the way of the screenshots you want to take.

When you’re finished, simply bring it up and click the Stop Capture button.  You’ll now find all your screenshots, named and in order, in your save folder.

For people who take a lot of screenshots, and by necessity require something that can take a lot of screenshots without any user intervention, Automatically Take Screenshots Software is a great tool.  It would be nice if would give an option to change the default format, and to perhaps only take a screenshot of a portion of the screen, but for what it is, it works quite well.