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Just started working on Windows 10 Home.

For a while, I could press Win + Alt + PrintScreen, and a screenshot of the active/focused window would have been grabbed automatically to a png file in this folder:

C:\Users\USERNAME\Videos\Captures

But since the Windows 10 Home Version 1809 update from some days ago, now when I do that, I get:

Gaming features not available.
Enable gaming features for this app to record gameplay

So no more of that.

Of course, I've seen stuff like https://www.cnet.com/how-to/7-ways-to-take-screenshots-in-windows-10/ - but, I just want to press a key combo, and save the active window screenshot directly somewhere in a png file. I:

  • do not want to press a key combo, and then get the screenshot in clipboard (because then I have to additionally open an image program, save and paste)
  • do not want to start an application, where I'd clip and then save

I want to press a key combo, and the active window screenshot should be captured as a png in some predefined directory - no clipping, no pasting, no saving with choosing of filenames.

Any ideas how I could do this?

2 Answers 2

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To my knowledge, Windows has never had a tool that saves screenshots to disk automatically. In Windows 10 build 1809 Microsoft released an updated snipping utility called Snip and Sketch which you can configure to open automatically when you press the PrtScrn key, but this does not meet the needs you have defined.

There are multiple 3rd party applications that offer this function. It is likely you were using one of these before.

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  • Thanks a lot - good to have it confirmed, that it never had a tool for that. Also, turns out that the shortcut I'd used that saves in Videos\Captures is some XBox related program, and you need to enable it per application (in case that application is allowed to be captured by this Xbox thing, which is not true for all apps) - so, even if it somewhat working, it's still a chore to set up. So third party apps it is, then...
    – sdbbs
    Commented Mar 6, 2019 at 15:23
  • 1
    "Windows has never had a tool that saves screenshots to disk automatically." It has since some years now. Win+PrintScreen saves the entire screen to C:\Users\yourname\Pictures\Screenshots (I think this was introduced even before Win 10). As OP mentioned, Win+Alt+PrintScreen is a feature of the Windows "Game Bar", but even that is a preinstalled standard utility since Windows 10 and often enabled by default.
    – Socowi
    Commented Jan 21, 2022 at 15:42
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Since some month I use the tool "Greenshot" (https://getgreenshot.org/). I think this meet all your requirements, but you need to configure it. Hope this helps.

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