Snagit 2018: Conversation with Chris Larson

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Chris Larson is the Technical Product Manager of TechSmith Snagit. He works with the amazing development team dedicated to Snagit in TechSmith’s Okemos, Michigan headquarters. Chris is a graduate of Michigan State University and has been with TechSmith for 11 years. He started his career in User Experience Design and now brings that background to this product leadership role. He relaxes outside of work with audiobooks, bbq, gym time, LEGO, astronomy, video games, just being outside, and hanging out with his family.

In this conversation, Chris talks about the new Snagit 2018.

Geetesh: Snagit 2018 offers so many new and improved features such as Smart Move, Grab Text, and Text Replace. Tell us more about these features, and what they mean to you.

Chris: Let me tell you about these new features.

Smart Move

This new feature allows you to simply toggle it on and it will automatically make objects in your screen captures movable. You can rearrange buttons, delete text, or edit other elements in your screenshots. This is building upon our previous release where we introduced Auto-Fill with our selection tool. But now we recognize areas of your captures for you, so it’s just a simple click and drag if you want to move something. It really feels like magic.

I use it quite frequently to quickly mock up an idea to show to my teammates. It’s always easier to communicate when you have a visual. 🙂

Grab Text

Now that Snagit can recognize objects in your screenshots with Smart Move, we also detect the text within a screenshot. And by using Optical Character Recognition, we extract the text from your screenshots. You can capture screen text from an error message, pop-up window, or file menu. It allows you to easily copy information without retyping all the text.

Snagit had a version of this in previous releases, but it relied on some now defunct Windows code, which made it very unreliable. We are happy to now bring you a version of this that’s not just a capture type like it was before, you can Grab Text from any existing image now. By working with new and existing users, we now have a solution the will work for the use cases that they’ve spelled out for us.

I find it particularly helpful for pulling data out of existing images. Especially infographics.

Text Replace

Building upon both Smart Move and Grab Text, Snagit can not only detect the text in your images but allow you to edit it too. You can edit the words, font, colors, and size of the text in your screenshots without having to redesign the entire image.

The primary reason we wanted to bring this functionality to Snagit was to support those that create technical documentation. People that capture and explain websites and applications to others. Those websites and applications are updating and changing at a rapid pace, making it hard to keep documentation up to date. Smart Move and Text Replace make this easier if the change is just moving a button or changing some text. You can do that by just double-clicking on the text and replacing to image in your documentation. Before you’d have to re-capture the website or application and recreate the image. It saves a ton of time.

Geetesh: TechSmith is 30 years old now. Tell us about this journey, and also your journey with Snagit—what has been the feature that you use the most?

Chris: You can follow us on Instagram and check out #techsmith30 to get an insight into why people love working at TechSmith.

I started off working at TechSmith on Camtasia as a User Experience Designer. I really enjoyed the talented people that work here and what both Snagit and Camtasia do for our customers. We empower people to create remarkable videos and images that help share knowledge and information. I was hooked. I eventually made the transition to Product Management for Snagit.

I mostly use Snagit with Screencast.com. I just looked at my library and I take anywhere from 4 to 20 screenshots every day. Most of those have some simple arrows and outlines to point out what I’m talking about. But frequently I’ll also have the need for creating an animated GIF of a couple steps, Smart Move, Grab Text, and blurring out content. Most of those are sent up to Screencast.com and then I link to those images and GIFs in emails and messages.

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