Automatically Smush Screenshots on Your PC

It’s good practice to compress images before you upload them to social media or your website, but going about optimizing your images can be boring and repetitive. In this post, we’ll show you how to automate the process of optimizing Windows screenshots using two free apps.

Tech Orbiter has already covered the two apps you’ll need – ShareX and File Optimizer. ShareX is pretty much the best free screenshot and screencasting app for Windows, while File Optimizer does a great job of reducing file sizes. Before we start, you should give our article on File Optimizer a quick read (especially the last part where we talk about PNG optimization).

Done? Great, let’s automate.

Download and install ShareX. Download and unzip File Optimizer somewhere on your PC. While we totally recommend ShareX, you’re free to use your screenshot app of choice, as long as it can automatically send the captured image to a third-party app. In this case, that third-party app is File Optimizer.

Double click to open ShareX from the system tray, and click Task settings… Under Actions, click the Add button.

As shown in the screenshot, give a name to the action, and set the file path as your File Optimizer executable.

Make sure this “File Optimizer” action is enabled, and then close the window.

You will be back in ShareX’s main window, when you need to click After capture tasks and make sure there are tick marks next to Save image to file and Perform actions.

If you’ve already configured File Optimizer (if you haven’t, just go through that small article once), this is all you need to do. Now, every time you take a screenshot with ShareX, it will send the capture image to File Optimizer before saving it to your PC. The whole thing takes just a few seconds more, and you get a screenshot that’s as much as 80% smaller than the original (for PNG files).


If you already have a bunch of non-optimized screenshots on your PC, you can bulk optimize them by selecting them (or the folders they’re in), dragging them to File Optimizer, and clicking Optimize all files.

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