Snagit 2022 Revealed

Snagit 2022 Revealed

Snagit 2022 is here! And it comes packed with brand new and updated features to help instructional designers, L&D professionals, and anyone who wants to create video level up their content.

To explain more about what’s new on Snagit and why, TechSmith’s Chris Larson, Technical Product Manager and Daniel Foster, Strategy Manager, joined The Visual Lounge to give us a breakdown.

Chris currently works remotely with an amazing development team dedicated to Snagit. He’s a graduate of Michigan State University and joined TechSmith 14 years ago with a background in user experience design.

Daniel heads up the marketing and product strategy side for Snagit. He has 16 years of software industry experience in marketing, communications, content creation, and social media. Daniel has previously spoken at STC Summit, LavaCon, tcworld, and other conferences.

Whether you’ve been a long-standing Snagit fan from the very beginning or are looking to get started, this episode is full of new updates and tips on what you can get out of the tool.

You can watch the video on this topic at the top of this post, to listen to the podcast episode, hit play below, or read on for more…

How Snagit is still going strong – 31 years later

As software goes, 31 years is a long time for a tool to be on the market and remain popular. When it first launched, it was a modest beginning compared to what it is now. Snagit was originally about simple visual captures and images primarily and has since exploded in popularity.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen a huge need for tools like Zoom, video streaming, and video creation which has helped to shift the direction Snagit is heading in.   

While things look different in the market, 31 years later, the primary aims remain the same. As Chris explained, we want a tool to make it quick and easy to capture images and video, but with a new and improved user experience.

“We’re starting to really make that a better experience. Make it quick for people to capture and get what they want out immediately. That quick sharing mechanism is something we’re trying to keep, but we also want to bring these new ways of communicating.”

Video creation used to be something that only a tiny segment of people was even interested in. But it’s not just the content creators on YouTube or L&D professionals who need to make videos anymore.

Almost everyone has had to get comfortable being on camera, whether that’s recording a video or jumping on a dozen daily Zoom calls. The pandemic and remote working have made visual communication much more of an everyday thing.

As Daniel puts it, “making a video used to be an event. It was like, I want to sit down and make a video, but we don’t think that way anymore.”

How Snagit’s cloud library makes storing captures a breeze

"Having just a giant bunch of files is not useful at all. It's really all about how quickly you can get your hands on things you need later." - Daniel Foster

One of Snagit’s handiest features has been its library, which allows users to make captures quickly and store them. But our new and improved library means you can now save those captures to the cloud instead of on a single machine.

In the age of Google Drive, Dropbox, and remote working, this seemed like a natural next step for the tool. You’re no longer locked into using one machine. You can just access your Snagit library from any device, making collaboration and sharing so much easier and faster.

“The advent of cloud computing and all these different things like Dropbox and Google Drive and things like that, it just felt like it was the right the right time for us to bring this to Snagit.”

The library also has a search function so you can locate the files you need in seconds rather than sifting through hundreds of random capture files.

Cross-platform compatibility

Another great feature that’s new to Snagit 2022 is the ability to open and edit the same Snagit files on both Windows and Mac computers. Daniel previously had to say goodbye to all his old Windows Snagit files when he moved over to Mac a few years ago, but now that’s a thing of the past.

This cross-platform compatibility is possible with Snagit’s new file format SNAGX, which replaces the old SNAG format on Windows and SNAGPROJ on Mac.

This solves a big problem for those who switch between Windows and Mac, as Daniel explains:

“I think about the teams that I’ve talked to, and these are often heavy content creators, who are like, “I actually have to document software on Windows and Mac. I’m constantly going back and forth.” And a real pain point, since the beginning for that group is that they’re different file formats, so it can be confusing.”

How the TechSmith team focused on building the best version of Snagit yet

A tough job for any development team is deciding what features to update and what new ones to develop. Chris breaks TechSmith’s approach down into three categories.

1. The expected

These are changes that everyone expects to see as the market changes. For example, many tools have cloud compatibility, so it makes sense to include that in our tool as well.

2. Improvements

The second category is about improving and iterating based on user feedback to fine-tune certain features.

3. Delighters

The third category is all about how can we go beyond what’s both needed and expected? It’s about building things that people don’t know they need but will improve their lives or workflows.

For the expected and the improvements categories, we need to look at larger trends and feed that through to the development team so they can target certain problems.

The big focuses for Snagit 2022

"What we've done with Snagit 2022 has been a lot of things around improving the video engine itself."- 
Chris Larson

One of the biggest focuses has been on improving things around the video engine itself. This enables people who are using either high-quality cameras or other virtual cameras to add effects and more customization.

As Chris explained, TechSmith also wanted to build greater stability into the tool. So if there’s a big error on your computer, you’ll be able to recover those captures on the Mac and Windows soon as well.

Another part of the development has been improving the audio and video sync to ensure that the video matches the audio more accurately. 

“Our main driving force around a lot of the features we’re building is that it’s just ready to go. You just take a video, and it’s there for you. You can share it out, you can drag it to wherever you need it to go. And it doesn’t require that extra step of rendering it, and you having to wait. It’s really good for that quick communication.”

Hidden gems on Snagit 2022

As many Snagit users will already know, the tool is packed full of features – some you might not have even discovered yet.

Chris and Daniel shared their top hidden gems they’d love users to explore.

For Chris, it’s the Step Tool. This is a handy little feature that lets you add steps to illustrate a process, and you can find it in your Snagit Editor toolbar. While it’s not a new feature, it’s something that Chris is really excited for more people to explore. He describes it as a “lightbulb moment whenever we mention it to people.”

If you want to find your own hidden gems on Snagit, Chris highlighted the Learn More button at the bottom of the tool.

“What’s really powerful is that Learn More button at the bottom. So we’ve started exposing, on the website a lot of our tutorials in a way where we broke them out into separate pages. So we have a different page for each of the tools. We’re combining our help and our video tutorials all in one spot for each of them. And I’m excited about that. So that’ll help people on their own find all these hidden gems too.”

For Daniel, he’s excited about a fairly new addition on Snagit – templates. This is something that lets you create professional-looking documentation without having to design everything yourself. You can just load up a template, slot your images and text in and voilà! You have a great piece of content to show people.

“These are things that people learn how to do when they take courses on technical communication and instructional design. And we’re not saying we can make you a pro at this overnight. But we’re taking some of the best practices from that and are putting them right into these templates.”

We could go on and on about all the fantastic new features that Snagit 2022 has to offer, but the best way to discover them is to give the tool a try. You can also read more about what’s new in Snagit 2022 and how to get started.

Capture your screen with Snagit

Snagit lets you quickly capture your screen and camera, add additional context, and share images, GIFs, or videos across your preferred platforms.

Matt Pierce

Matt Pierce is a Learning & Video Ambassador at TechSmith. In this role speaks and teaches about video creation and visual communication. A graduate of Indiana University he has ten years of experience working in learning and development with a focus on visual instruction. He has directly managed the training, user assistance, video, and other teams for TechSmith. Teach him something @piercemr

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