Screenshots, when blogging, or even just sharing a website with friends, can greatly slow you down. Suddenly, you’re browsing your desktop, cropping in an external editor and searching for a reliable image host.

An in-browser application solves this problem. With the three Chrome extensions discussed below, you can snap and annotate screen snapshots without ever leaving your browser. With one of these tools, you can even take screenshots from your desktop and other applications!

Awesome Screenshot

Awesome Screenshot is one of the best in-browser screen snapshot alternatives, and one I’m rather fond of using myself. You can choose to capture the entire webpage, or just the part that’s currently visible in your browser. By resizing your browser window, you can actually dynamically crop your screenshots before they’re taken!

Once you’ve snapped (part) of a webpage, you can use the extension for some basic editing, ideal for bloggers and amateur annotations. Resize or further crop your screenshot, and improve the image quality or compress for the web. Annotations consist of basic circles, rectangles, lines, freeform and text on top of the photo. More importantly, the special blur tool allows you to make parts of the screenshot inedible, fast.

It also allows you to upload the resulting screen snapshot instantly, but users should be forewarned that Pict.com is a rather unstable image host, and images might not be kept online. For that purpose, it’s advised to also store your images locally or upload them to a trustworthy image host yourself.

In short, a lightweight screenshot and annotating tool, ideal for bloggers and amateur sharing.

LightShot (Windows only)

This might be considered a more heavyweight alternative to Awesome Screenshot. After clicking the icon in the browser bar, you can select any visible part on your screen to snap a picture. Although it’s not possible to snap an entire webpage, this tool also allows you to take screenshots of your desktop or other applications. The only real downside is that that it’s only supported on Windows.

The extension also allows you to annotate those screenshots, but is not limited to that aspect. For that matter, the embedded image editor is far more advanced than the default image editor on Windows, with support for layers and filters. When you’re done, save the image to your desktop or upload it to the LightShot server.

For Windows, LightShot is by far the most advanced screenshot tool available as a Chrome extension. If you regularly need heavy editing while working with screen snapshot, LightShot will the the extension of choice.

Webpage Screenshot

This was the original screenshot application for Google Chrome, and the first that allowed for full-page screenshots with automated scrolling. To that extent, the extension is rather simple, and a far lighter alternative to Awesome Screenshot or LightShot.

Clicking the toolbar button will snap the visible area, or take a full-page screenshot of the website, optionally by interval. Afterwards, you have the ability to further crop the image, apply basic annotation and share it online.

Do you have first-hand experience with these extensions, or do you know of any other great Google Chrome screenshot tools? Let us know in the comments section below!