Recently, I raved about some of the major improvements that Microsoft has made to the Snipping Tool during the Windows 11 era, and how that app has become essential to me. But as much as I love the new Snipping Tool, there are definitely some frustrating things about it, some of them being new, while others being longstanding pain points.

So this time, I'm being a little more negative and talking about things Microsoft needs to fix to make the Snipping Tool a little less frustrating to use.

4 Fix the crashes

Is it just me?

I wanted to start with this one because I'm not completely sure how commonplace this one is. I can't find reports of it online, but I've experienced this myself on multiple computers, and it's still happening. Many times, when I try to launch a screen capture with Snipping Tool and I have a context menu showing in File Explorer, Snipping Tool will simply crash when launching the capture tool. The selection pointer is briefly displayed, but the context menu just closes and the capture UI never appears.

As I said, this is happening to me right now on different computers with different hardware, and I don't understand it. Not every context menu seems to cause the issue, and sometimes it even works normally. But this frustrating issue has forced me to install a third-party app on multiple occasions, and it's crazy that it's been happening for months at this point.

3 Stop resizing at random

I just want to open a new image

This is probably a petty thing to complain about, but I'm also getting frustrated with the fact that the Snipping Tool window resizes to whatever it feels like whenever I open a new image. I like the image editor in Snipping Tool, and sometimes I just like dragging and dropping files into the Snipping Tool window to open it.

Such a simple action shouldn't be cause for issues but every time I drag an image into the Snipping Tool window, it resizes to a preset size, and it's frustrating because it constantly messes up my window layout and it's too small for proper editing.

This seems to happen because the Snipping Tool without an image open is very small, so it resizes when you open an image so it gives you a bit more space. But that should only happen if the window is too small beforehand, and the current behavior often makes the window smaller than it was before. It needs to change.

2 A better crop tool

Let me get the right aspect ratio

When I'm crafting guides for XDA, one thing that I have to be mindful is the aspect ratio of images, and I try my best to apply that to screenshots as well. What that means right now is that if I want to grab a screenshot in a specific aspect ratio, I need to take a screenshot, make edits to it in Snipping Tool if needed, and then use the Photos app to crop to the aspect ratio I want.

Snipping Tool does let you crop screenshots, but you can't see the final resolution or set an aspect ratio you want to target, so it's not very useful for this. I don't see why this shouldn't be built into the app, and I could even see this feature being built right into the capture tool so you can draw with the right aspect ratio to begin with (though this is not strictly necessary).

1 Make it easier to save changes

A "Save as" option is all it takes

Finally, another very annoying about the Snipping Tool is how it handles saving files. By default, your screeneshots are saved automatically, and after taking one, you can click the notification to make edits to it. Edits are saved to the clipboard automatically, but they're not saved to the saved file automatically. And what's worse, when you click the Save button, you still need to use the File Explorer dialog to choose a name for the file, and if it's the same name as the original screenshot, you need to confirm you want to overwrite it.

Of course, that last part is standard behavior for saving files with the same name as an existing one, but why does the Snipping Tool do this in the first place? In any other app, when you open a file, you have the option to save the changes to that file, but in the Snipping Tool, the Save button acts like a Save As button, and it puts you through unnecessary dialogs that are just a waste of time.

All Microsoft needs to do here is have separate Save and Save As buttons, and we'd be golden. The Photos app does this, I can't understand why Snipping Tool is different.

Some of these problems are baffling

You could say that these are far from major issues, but when you're trying to be productive and do things quickly, they can really waste your time and slow you down. I love the Snipping Tool and use it daily, but I could work significantly faster if these changes were implemented. Plus, I wouldn't need to install third-party apps for taking screenshots of context menus — and honestly just saying that out loud sounds ridiculous. I'm hoping these problems will be fixed sooner rather than later.