How to use the Snipping Tool

The Snipping Tool's one irreplaceable feature is the delay timer — the only built-in way to screenshot a menu that closes the moment you click elsewhere.

Updated 15 September 2026

Opening it#

Press Win, type snip, press Enter. Right-click the result and pin it to your taskbar if you'll use it often.

Win+Shift+S skips the app window entirely and goes straight to a capture, which is what you want most of the time. Open the full app when you need the timer, want to edit a capture you've already taken, or need to change settings.

The four capture modes#

• Rectangle. Drag a box. The default, and right for nine captures out of ten.
• Window. Hover over a window and click it. Captures it cropped to its edges, including rounded corners, without the desktop behind. Alt+PrtSc does the same job in two keys, with one difference worth knowing.
• Full screen. Every display at once, no dragging.
• Freeform. Draw an irregular shape by hand. Genuinely useful for circling one region of a diagram without a rectangle's worth of surrounding clutter.

The delay timer#

This is the feature worth knowing. Open menus, dropdowns, tooltips and right-click context menus all close the instant they lose keyboard focus — which is exactly what pressing a capture shortcut does. So they're impossible to capture by normal means.

1. Open the Snipping Tool app.
2. Click the clock icon and choose a delay: 3, 5 or 10 seconds.
3. Click New. The app gets out of the way.
4. Open the menu you want to capture and hold it open.
5. When the delay expires the screen dims mid-menu and you can drag your selection normally.

Five seconds is usually enough. Ten if you're navigating into a submenu.

Annotating#

After a capture, the image opens in the editor with a ballpoint pen, highlighter, eraser, ruler and crop tool. The ruler is easy to miss and the most useful of them — hold it against the canvas and draw along its edge for straight arrows and underlines, or scroll while hovering over it to rotate it to an angle.

Ctrl+Z undoes strokes one at a time. Ctrl+S saves, Ctrl+C copies the annotated version back to the clipboard. More on annotation.

Settings to change immediately#

Three dots, then Settings:

• Automatically save original screenshots — on. Otherwise a capture you forget to save exists only until your next copy.
• Automatically copy changes — on. Keeps the clipboard in sync with your annotations, so a paste doesn't silently drop them.
• Ask to save edited screenshots — on. Catches the case where you annotate, then close without saving.

Text and redaction#

On Windows 11, the text actions button reads any text in the capture and lets you copy it, with a separate control for blanking out email addresses and phone numbers. For a screenshot going into a public bug report or a forum post, that redaction step takes two seconds and saves a lot of regret.

The Snipping Tool is one of six routes to a capture on Windows; the others are here.