Getting started with Capture Core
From install to your first screenshot

1. Before you start: switching the app to English

2. Installing

Get the installer from the download page. It is about 19MB. Double-click the downloaded Capture Core_x.y.z_x64-setup.exe and follow the installer — there are no choices you need to think hard about.

Worth saying up front: the app has not been downloaded by many people yet, so your browser and Windows may ask you to confirm during download and on first run. Neither is a virus detection, and you can continue past both. The download page has the exact click path for Edge and for the SmartScreen screen.

Once it finishes, Capture Core appears in the notification area (the system tray, bottom right). It runs in the background, so closing the main window does not stop it capturing. For as long as your PC is on, it is one keypress away.

3. Your first screenshot

Press PrintScreen. The screen dims slightly and you are in region-select mode.

Two things work here. Drag with the mouse and you get that rectangle. Click on a window without dragging and you get the whole window — as you move the pointer, the window under it is outlined, so you can see what you are about to get. Esc backs out at any time.

After the shot, a small thumbnail pops up in the corner of the screen. That is your confirmation. First one done — it should not have taken ten seconds.

If pressing PrintScreen does nothing, Windows 11 has claimed the key. See Common snags.

4. Capture modes and default keys

There is more than one way to take a shot. These are the ones that come up day to day, with the keys they are bound to out of the box.

Every key can be changed under Settings (設定) → Hotkeys (ホットキー). Pressing F1 while the app is running opens the shortcut list, and you can reassign keys directly from there.

One small trick while selecting a region: hold Shift while dragging and the selection is kept inside the window you started in. It stops the usual mistake of wanting just the browser window and catching a strip of whatever is behind it.

You do not have to bring up the main window to pick a mode. Right-click the Capture Core icon in the notification area and open Capture: the same modes are listed there, along with text extraction and translation.

Toggles in the same menu switches hotkeys, clipboard history recording, the Quick Tray, the edge launcher and start-with-Windows on or off on the spot. When a key clashes with another app, this is the quickest place to pause the hotkeys for a while.

5. Right after you capture

The editor does not open on every shot. Most screenshots are “paste it into chat and move on” or “glance at it and bin it”, and opening an editor for those is in the way.

The thumbnail that appears in the corner can be dragged straight into a chat window or an email. When you do need to annotate, open the shot in the editor from the library in the main window. That “shoot it and throw it” speed is the part we fussed over most.

For longer sessions you can switch to the Quick Tray in Settings (設定) — it takes the thumbnail's place and stacks your captures at the edge of the screen so you can save, copy, discard or edit them in a batch later. Take twenty shots while reading through a document, then keep the three you actually need.

6. Arrows, masks and other edits

Choosing edit for a shot in the library, or from the Quick Tray, opens the editor. The tools you reach for most are along the top:

• Lines (ライン) · Shapes (図形) — the basic “look at this” tools. Arrows are under Lines; Highlight is under Shapes
• Number (番号) — drops ①②③ badges in sequence as you click. For step-by-step instructions
• Text (テキスト) — a written note on the image
• Mask (マスク) — hide what should not be seen, with blur, mosaic, frosted glass or a solid block. This is your tool for personal information that wandered into the shot

Cropping (切り抜き), resizing, rotation (画像回転) and color adjustment (色調整) are all in the same window. With nothing selected, the right panel shows Home (ホーム), where rotate and flip buttons and your frequently used tools are one click away; Ctrl+R also rotates 90° right. Save with Ctrl+S. The free edition never puts a watermark on a saved image. That is a product decision, and worth stating plainly.

7. Where files go

Saved images go to Pictures\Capture Core by default. They are not locked inside a database — it is an ordinary Windows folder, visible in Explorer, and if you ever stop using the app your images simply stay where they are.

The library view inside the app sorts by date or size and moves or deletes files in bulk. Deletions go through the Windows Recycle Bin, so an accidental one is recoverable.

8. Settings worth doing first

The defaults are meant to be usable as they are, but opening Settings (設定) once and adjusting these three will save you friction later:

1. Save folder — 保存先フォルダ. Whether the default under Pictures suits you, or work should go to another drive
2. Hotkeys — ホットキー. If another background app has claimed a key, the settings screen flags the clash. Move it to something comfortable
3. Theme — テーマ. Several color schemes including light and dark, plus an automatic mode that follows Windows

One more thing worth knowing: turn on Edge launcher (画面端ランチャー) in Settings (設定; it is off by default), and sliding the mouse to the edge or corner of the screen opens a fan-shaped launcher, giving you the capture modes and tools without the keyboard. It works over full-screen video too, so if you are mouse-first, start there.

9. Common snags

10. Next steps

That covers everyday screenshot work. Beyond it sit the Pro features: device-to-device sync that never touches a cloud, full-text search across the words inside your images, and file names taken from the playback position of whatever you are watching. All of them can be tried free for 14 days from Settings (設定) → Edition (エディション), with nothing but an email address.

What changed in each version is published in the release notes. If something does not work, please get in touch — it reaches the developers directly.