Windows has had a built-in feature to capture screenshots for a very long time. In fact, I can remember it as far back as in Windows 95. All this time when you pressed the PrtScr (Print Screen) button, the current screen was captured to the Clipboard, but to save the screenshot you needed an image editor.
Windows 8 comes with a very useful and convenient improvement. On it if you press Win + PrtScr, your entire desktop is captured, with a nice dim effect, and is automatically saved as a PNG file in your Pictures folder (%UserProfile%\Pictures\Screenshots).
Screenshots are sequentially named in the form Screenshot (<index >).png. Windows maintains a count of captured images in the Registry, so even if you move or delete existing screenshots in the Pictures folder the index is not reset. If for any reason you wish to reset it, here’s how to go about it:
- Open Registry Editor (Win + R > type in
regedit> hit Enter). - Then navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer. - In the right-pane, look for a DWORD value named
ScreenshotIndex. - Now change its value to
1by double-clicking on it.
That’s it!
Do note that if you already have existing screenshots in the Screenshots folder, they will not be overwritten after the index reset. So if you already had a file named Screenshot (1).png in the folder, the next capture will start from Screenshot (2).png.
If you don’t want to mess with the Windows Registry, then simply download this file and run it.
Download: Reset Windows 8 Screenshot Index