Crop and Lock for screenshot

[engMohammedMohsen]

Description of the new feature / enhancement

add option to Crop and Lock to take a screenshot and make it always on top.

Scenario when this would be used?

when I want to compare between two situations like previous output result and current output result.

Supporting information

you can make a shortcut win+ctrl+shift+s

[crutkas]

This feels like a very niche use case that can be done with snipping tool and just AoT that window.

[crutkas]

Actually, issue then is what is the hosting app for the screen shot and empowering the user to close it

[AneesAmjad]

if anyone is still looking for this function, ShareX has this option and it's pretty neat

[fm-sys]

This feels like a very niche use case

I wouldn't consider it a niche use-case. More about it further down...

that can be done with snipping tool and just AoT that window.

Unfortunately, this workaround is pretty inefficient and requires quite a lot of intermediate steps. I've recorded a video, and it took nearly 30 seconds for something which would ideally be just one hotkey away.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/18cbef63-7fe3-48a6-a0a3-f596462c35ab

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I believe #33071 is also a duplicate of this issue btw. They mention the following use case over there:

Allow cropping a section of a large code file (say top while working at the bottom) as reference while working elsewhere in the file.

My personal use case would be that nowadays quite a lot is happening inside the browser. Quite often, I want to keep a small portion of the current website visible and switch to e.g. the writing tool also running in a different tab in the same browser window. Of course, I could move the tab to a different browser window first and then use crop-and-lock, but that doesn't sound really efficient either, especially as PowerToys is designed to further improve the workflows of power users.

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I currently have two ideas how this could be implemented:

• Add a right click context menu to the thumbnail mode, allowing to pause the thumbnail
  • add a configuration option if live update should be enabled by default
• Add a separate activation hotkey for temporary AoT screenshots

Any preference which path to follow? I personally would prefer the second one...

[fm-sys]

PR is ready: #40720