Picozu Shooter Takes Screenshots In Your Browser

If you ask me, addons are the best thing about Firefox. They are free and easy to install, they provide the user with an effortless way to add new features, and there are so many to choose from! In case one of your addons stops working, chances are that you'll find a functional replacement.

We've already covered some great Firefox addons here on Teksocial: from different kinds of speed dial addons to those that improve readability. Today we'll take a quick look at a small tool that has only one job – and does it perfectly.

Picozu Shooter is a Firefox addon for taking screenshots. It captures the contents of the browser window (not the entire screen) and supports custom selection. This is useful when you want to save only a part of a web page. Instead of printing the whole page to PDF, you can simply select the desired parts of the page with Picozu and save them as separate images. Picozu is also helpful for taking screenshots of web apps, as well as for pages that don't allow users to save images – just use Picozu to take a screenshot of the image you wanted to save.

You can install Picozu Shooter for Firefox from the official Mozilla addons page; it's also available as an addon for Safari. A tiny pink icon will appear in your Firefox toolbar; a left-click on it will launch Picozu Shooter.

As you can see, Picozu Shooter opens in a separate window, overlaying your main Firefox window and duplicating its contents. It comes with the basic functions; since it does what it's supposed to do, there's no need for advanced settings and dialogs. I really like this straightforward, no-frills approach.

You can select the entire window automatically or draw rectangles to select custom regions of the window. The default selection color is blue, but you can change this. The selection can be saved as either a PNG or a JPG image, copied to clipboard or to an external image editing software.

Last but not least, you can edit the image in Picozu's own image editor. The Shooter addon is, in fact, just a supplement to the main product – Picozu HTML image editor, a feature-packed web app so awesome that it deserves its own review, which is exactly what I'm going to do. The next episode of Picozu adventures examines the power of this amazing online editor, so make sure to watch this space.

Ivana Isadora Devcic is a freelance writer, copyeditor and translator fluent in English, Swedish, Croatian and Norwegian. She's a Linux user and KDE fan interested in web design, productivity and personal branding. Ivana tweets about the world around her as @skadinna.