By default you can use PrScrn key to quickly capture screenshots with Snagit. It should work most of the time. However when Snagit fails to launch and capture screen by its hotkey, you may have to reset its hotkey or change it to something other than PrtScn?
Steps to Change Snagit capture hotkey
Note that we will use Snagit 2018 for Windows in the demo. If you use Snagit 2019 or other versions, you may find some difference in appearance and settings. Also Snagit Editor has its own hotkeys different from the Snagit hotkeys.
You can customize the default capture hotkeys or change Snagit capture hotkeys from
Capture window > File > Capture Preferences > Hotkeys tab if you are on Windows, or Snagit > Preferences > Keyboard tab for Mac users.
The Capture Preferences however doesn’t allow us to set or change hotkeys to start image or video capture. For example, you can’t set PrtSc or Print screen key to start new capture. You can only set how to set hotkeys to start, pause, resume or stop video capture here. Check out more Snagit hotkey settings and options below.
Set & Change Snagit Global Capture Hotkey
Under the red capture button, you can see text “press a hotkey”, click the text field, you can then press or type the hotkey you wish to use as Global Capture Hotkey for screenshots taking, screen video recording. They share the same capture hotkey. When you are in the Image capture mode, you can press the hotkey to start capture your screen as image; when you are in the Video capture, you can press the same hotkey to start recording your PC screen as videos. You can switch between Image and Video capture modes at the left pane.
Set & Change Snagit Capture Hotkeys for Presets or Profiles
New Snagit versions support Presets or Profiles that automatically save your capture settings. Presets are a great way to save a desired combination of capture settings (image or video), and then initiate a capture using those settings in a single click. In an earlier article, we already introduced how you can automatically save screenshots to a folder in Windows with Snagit other than opening them in Snagit Editor. From this linked page, you can see how Presets can help us simplify our workflow under some situations.
Update Apr 2019: this article was originally published in Sep 2013 and has since been updated. we updated above guide to reflect the changes in Snagit 2018, Snagit 2019 for Windows and Mac.