The Snipping Tool quietly became the only screenshot app I keep installed on Windows 11

Microsoft has turned the Snipping Tool into a real screenshot app, and most people still haven't noticed. These are the four features that won me over.

The Snipping Tool quietly became the only screenshot app I keep installed on Windows 11
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For years, I kept a third-party screenshot app installed alongside the Windows Snipping Tool, such as Greenshot or ShareX, depending on what I was doing. Last year, I uninstalled some of them and never put them back. Snipping Tool has absorbed enough of what those apps did that I don't miss them, the same way Task Manager only tells half the story until you find the rest.

The eyedropper made PowerToys ColorPicker redundant

Most people miss this one. After launching Snipping Tool with Win + Shift + S, the eyedropper icon on the floating toolbar opens a color picker that reads any pixel on screen.

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Hover, and a small pill follows the cursor with HEX, RGB, and HSL values at once. Click to copy whichever format you're currently set to. Ctrl + + zooms in for pixel-level sampling, which is genuinely necessary on small icons or anti-aliased text. The dropdown next to the eyedropper switches which format gets copied by default.

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I used to keep PowerToys installed for ColorPicker. Pulling values for CSS work, matching client brand colors, or grabbing a shade out of a Figma export was frequent enough that nothing else was worth the install. With the eyedropper now baked into Snipping Tool, that module came off my PowerToys list and didn't get added back.

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Screen recording with audio quietly killed my reason for OBS

Recording a screen on Windows used to mean Xbox Game Bar, which only records the focused app, or OBS Studio, which is overkill for a 20-second bug reproduction. The Snipping Tool sits squarely in the middle. Win + Shift + R opens the same overlay, except now I'm drawing a recording area. Hit Start, the countdown runs, the bar collapses, and I'm recording.

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The microphone icon on the recording toolbar is muted by default, which is the right call. I've forgotten to mute mics in other tools more times than I'd like to admit. System audio captures by default and toggles from the same row.

The output is an MP4 dropped into Videos > Screen Recordings, with trim handles on the preview if I need to clean up the start or end without opening Clipchamp.

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There's also a button that turns the first 30 seconds of any clip into an animated GIF, making it easy to drop short demos into Slack threads.

Win + Shift + T grabs text off the screen without a screenshot in between

This is the feature that finally got me to uninstall PowerToys' Text Extractor. Win + Shift + T opens an OCR overlay system-wide, with no screenshot or editor in between. I drag a box around any visible text, click Copy all text, and paste it anywhere. It works on web pages that block selection, PDFs, error dialogs, paused video, and text baked into images.

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For anything I've already captured, the Scan text button in the editor does the same job post-snip, plus a Copy as table option that's surprisingly accurate for screenshots of grids and spreadsheets. The OCR runs locally, which matters whenever I'm pulling text off something I wouldn't paste into a cloud tool.

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The feature is tied to the Snipping Tool app version, not the Windows build. If Win + Shift + T does nothing, the fix is to update the Snipping Tool through the Microsoft Store - the shortcut was shipped in app updates in 2025.

Quick Redact black-bars phone numbers and emails in one click

This is the feature I didn't know I needed until I started using it. Take a snip with anything sensitive in it, click Scan text in the editor, then click Quick Redact. Any phone numbers or email addresses automatically get a solid black rectangle laid over them. The dropdown next to the button lets me redact only emails, only phone numbers, or both.

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For anything Quick Redact doesn't catch, like names or physical addresses, I highlight the text and press Ctrl + R, or right-click and choose Redact text. The black bar looks intentional, not like a Sharpie scribble.

Just to be safe, you should save a flattened copy of the redacted image right after applying the bars. The redaction can be undone with Ctrl + Z before the file is written, and there's no separate confirmation step to lock it in.

One more caveat. Quick Redact flags only patterned data, so it misses names and anything that doesn't look like a phone number or an email. Always eyeball the image before sending.

The gaps that still send me to ShareX

For all the ground the Snipping Tool has made up, a few gaps still keep paid tools and ShareX in business.

There's no scrolling capture, which is the biggest one for me. Long settings pages and full web articles still need ShareX or a browser extension. There's no upload integration either, so getting a screenshot to Imgur, Dropbox, or a Slack webhook in one click still needs something else.

Annotation is also thinner than premium, Snagit's. The Snipping Tool gives you a pen, a highlighter, a few shapes, and emojis. Snagit gives you numbered callouts, step indicators, themed templates, and editor tooling that doesn't require a separate trip into Paint or Photos.

And the save settings are basic. Filenames are timestamps, and there's no project-based organization. For most people, that's fine, but for high-volume capture work, those are real reasons to keep a third-party tool installed alongside.

The same audit works on the rest of your utility list

With screenshots handled by the built-in tool, the obvious next audit is everything else still loading at startup. Clipboard managers, color pickers, on-screen rulers, even small rename utilities - Windows has grown native equivalents to most of them. Running the same check on the rest of the third-party list usually thins it out by half.

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Yasir covers Windows, hardware, and privacy. A Windows user since XP and a Mechanical Engineer by training, he likes digging into the technical details most people skip over. His work has also been published on MakeUseOf, spanning everything from Windows optimizations to Excel deep dives. Outside of writing, he tinkers with his custom-built Ryzen rig, watches Impractical Jokers, and listens to way too much Lo-Fi.

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