Where does the Snipping Tool save my snips?

A common question on many Windows forums is where does the Snipping Tool save my snips? So we thought we’d take a quick look at the Snipping Tool as well as Snip and Sketch and where they save the user’s snips.

Snipping Tool

Starting with the Windows Accessory, Snipping Tool, this software allows the user to save their snip to the Pictures library by default. As soon as the user saves a snip to a different folder, the software remembers the folder and will default to the new folder in future.

By default, the Snipping Tool will try to name the file ‘Capture’ for each use of the ‘Save As’ command. However, it does remember the file type of the previously saved snip when saving a new snip.

Snip and Sketch

Snip and Sketch’s folder selection works in a similar fashion to the Snipping Tool’s, by defaulting to the Pictures library, but remembering a different folder if the user chooses to save their snips elsewhere.

However, Snip and Sketch does use a different file naming convention from its older cousin. When saving a snip in Snip and Sketch, the software generates a time-stamped file name for you in the form

‘Annotation yyyy-mm-dd hhmmss.ext’

Again the software remembers the previous file type used and sets the extension of the new snip’s file name accordingly.

Interestingly the Snipping Tool allows the user to save a snip as an MHT file – Snip and Sketch doesn’t. If you are interested, you can check out what MHT files are in Wikipedia.

Well, there we have it, where you find your saved snips in both the Windows Snipping Tool and its newer cousin, Snip and Sketch.