Auto Screen Capture is a free open source program for Microsoft's Windows operating system that allows you to capture up to four automatically connected screens.
The portable program is probably the most advanced program of its kind for Windows at that time. First, the basics. You can download the application from the project website at Sourceforge.
Automatic screen capture is compatible with Windows 7 and newer versions of Windows, and can be run immediately without installation.
The program has no dependencies and does not require third-party libraries for its functionality, and packages all its functionality in an executable file of 300 Kilobytes.
The screen capture software interface seems a bit crowded at first glance, but everything clears up after a couple of minutes.
The left side of the interface lists all the options and some data, the right side the different screens and previews.
The eight different option tabs define if and when the screenshots are captured. The screens and regions define the capture areas, for example, the active window or the full screen of the first screen.
Regions can be very specific: you can set x and y positions, define width and height, and select an image format for the capture and its quality level. The same is possible for active windows or full screenshots.
Macros are compatible with file names and you can select a destination folder for captures.
Useful functions in Windows
Launches a list of actions in the system, by the user or the system, that will trigger a screenshot or an event. Triggers include starting or closing programs, and can be combined with program actions or with the loading of an external editor. It is necessary to add editors to the application so that the screenshots can be passed to them automatically.
Interval and programming define the time periods and intervals of screen capture operations. You can set limits and define the days of the week and the start and end times of the capture sessions. The default interval is 1 minute, but you can change it to better adapt to workflows.
Security provides an option to set a passphrase to prevent automatic screen capture from stopping by others, and screenshots, finally, shows all screen captures that have been recently captured. The program saves the records of the last 30 days by default.
When you select one of the screenshots, it is automatically displayed in the preview area. Each screenshot is listed with its format, width and height, window title, date and time of capture. There is an edit button to open it in a linked image editor, and another button to open the folder in which the screenshots were saved.
A click on the screen shows the full screen of the selected screen, and what the selected screen capture looked like.
Closing words
Automatic screen capture is a very powerful tool for Windows to create automated screenshots of full screens, active windows or regions. It is fantastic what the developer got into the small program of 311 kilobytes.