Can we really annotate in Snipping Tools on Win11?

In the Microsoft Play Store, the description of Snipping Tool says that you can annotate your clippings, but all I can see to try to do that with is the clunky pen tool, where handwritten letters look really unprofessional. Is there something I'm missing about adding text to what I clip? If not, that seems like a clear place for MS to add a great feature.

Hello Milo,

You can annotate screenshots like at step 5 below with the Snipping Tool, but it is very limited.


Another option is the Screenpresso app that has a free version. It is much better.

miloshapiro said:

In the Microsoft Play Store, the description of Snipping Tool says that you can annotate your clippings, but all I can see to try to do that with is the clunky pen tool, where handwritten letters look really unprofessional. Is there something I'm missing about adding text to what I clip? If not, that seems like a clear place for MS to add a great feature.

Click to expand...

If you press the three dots, one of options is to edit the snip with good old fashioned paint which allows decent text annotation, squares, circles etc.

As usual apps by MS are designed for the average developers age (13 or less). Apparently, they wanted to rename pen in snipping tool to crayon.

Hi,
Yeah paint is the easiest to deal with
Anything you snip can be pasted in paint and continued
I prefer the older versions of paint mostly menus/ icons but text is very simple to do in any version.
I have paint and snipping tool pinned to taskbar for easy access.

Disagree about the age thing
Basic for all ages is more accurate
Win-7 here the newer is pretty bland compared

Not sure why, but I can't use the three dots idea. I don't see an option under three dots for Paint, but there IS an "open with" option. I clicked that, hoping to see Paint among the choices. but before any choices can come up, I get a pop-up that says:

SNIPPING TOOL
Something went wrong.

And the only option is "OK" to make it go away. So no access to Paint.

miloshapiro said:

Not sure why, but I can't use the three dots idea. I don't see an option under three dots for Paint, but there IS an "open with" option. I clicked that, hoping to see Paint among the choices. but before any choices can come up, I get a pop-up that says:

SNIPPING TOOL
Something went wrong.

And the only option is "OK" to make it go away. So no access to Paint.

Click to expand...

Yeah - there is a bug somewhere. I had this but managed to fix it but cannot remember how,

Try the powershell command

Get-AppxPackage MicrosoftWindows.Client.Core -AllUsers | Reset-AppxPackage

ThrashZone said:

Disagree about the age thing
Basic for all ages is more accurate

Click to expand...

My age comment was targeted at design of snipping tool annotation - any mature person designing it would know we need decent annotation. My real point is more about the pathetic trend to "dumb down" everything for the domestic users.

cereberus said:

My age comment was targeted at design of snipping tool annotation - any mature person designing it would know we need decent annotation. My real point is more about the pathetic trend to "dumb down" everything for the domestic users.

Click to expand...

Hi,
Yeah I got that part and is pretty much why I use the win-7 apps instead paint/ snipping tool/ notepad
I just hate the bland look of the menus personally

cereberus, I'm not sure what you mean with the powershell command. I CAN get to paint just by bringing up the app; just not by clicking "open with" What would that command do?
and how might we trigger MS to look at that bug in Snipping Tool?

Hi,
Open with you'd have to dig for it located at windows/ system32 folder
If it errors then I guess you can do the usual CMD as admin goodies

Over this non-techie's head. I'll just do copy from the Snip, open paint from Start, and paste. It's not that much extra work than OpenWith, right? And I'm assuming the resolution would be the same.