Microsoft may have improved the Snipping Tool (Win-Shift-s keys), but insists on placing those screen shots in Pictures/Screenshots/, which may be accessible to One Drive and AI bots. A recent update to Win11 has caused my Snipping Tool window to stay open, on top of all other windows... no X box to close the window. I must use Alt-F4 to close the active window (not a big deal).

So far, ShareX is free - has been available since 2007. Shots include the mouse pointer (optional), can include a long scrolling web page, and take regularly timed screenshots. The images and be annotated, blurred out areas, saved in many file formats (including GIF for transparency and small file size). Send the results to about 80 services of your choice (e.g. Imgur, Google Drive, Dropbox, or by FTP, to a server.) Also, among those destinations are Lock Screen and Background, along with a URL shortener, a QR code maker, OCR, a hash checker, a metadata editor, and much more. What I did not see in ShareX (although it must be somewhere) is a setting for capturing an irregular area, which is included with the Snipping Tool from Microsoft.

Figure 1: a few of the many upload destinations