Screenies are little screen captures that Neopians take of random events, interesting tidbits, and often of other neopians at the Neoboards. It's like taking a picture so you can show everyone what you've been through and what you've done in Neopia.

The answer to this question is different for everyone. Some people like to add humor value to their screenies so that others may laugh, and others like to just simply catalogue their avatar successes. Whatever reason it is for you, the real question is this: is there any reason not to take screenies? :)

First, there are a few things you must consider: 1) Do you have a PC or a Mac? 2) For PCs, wheres the Print Screen button? 3) Where is the MS Paint Program? So far, this guide will only cover PC screenies. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to take a screencap on a Macintosh at this time. I'll be looking for Mac screeniers to complete the guide with a Mac section. :) If you have a PC, now all you need to know for now is the location of the "Print Screen" button on your keyboard. Every keyboard is different, but generally the "Print Screen" button is in the same area. Here, the Print Screen key is outlined in red. Pressing this button is the same as pressing ctrl†c, or "copy" on PCs. Now all you need to do is find the MS Paint program. Usually it's under your Start menu, and then under the subdirectory "Accessories." If it's not there, then just rummage around until you find it. Once you have it open, simply paste your screencapture into the window by pressing Ctrl†V... For the less experienced, the keys are outlined here in red. Once you have it pasted, it should look similar to this... The entire screen (or most of it) is in the picture, uncropped. To save your visitors and your web space from being overrun by these humongous screenies, we have to crop them. The entire screenie itself is outlined in red, and the cropped screenie that we want is in green. So the question is how can we get that green outlined part to be the only part of the picture? That's where the bounding box comes into play. You can see it outlined in green toward the top left of the image, in the toolbar on the lefthand side. Just click on that, and drag a box around the part of the screenie you want to save. Once you've done that, it should look like this... The entire screenie is still outlined in red, and the screenie we want is still outlined in green, but now there's a bounding box around our image. The bounding box is a dotted line, and it's pictured here with a purple border drawn around it. Great! Now all we have to do is drag the boxed-in image to the upper left corner. When you're finished, it should look like this... Big difference, huh? We may not've gotten exactly the image we wanted, but that's alright. Now all that's left is getting rid of the stuff we've left in the background. To do that, we need to change the canvas size. You can do that by finding the little boxes that're around the outsides of the image, and dragging them around until you've got your image cropped. The boxes I'm talking about are pictured below in orange. Your image should look similar to this once you're done dragging the boxes to where you want them. As you can see, we've got our cropped image outlined in green and nothing else is around it! If you've followed me to this point, good for you! Let's keep going! So here we've got a boring old screenie with nothing special about it at all. Saving it like this wouldn't amount to much, and it certainly wouldn't keep anyone interested. So why not add text to make the screenie more interesting? Above we can see a text box, using the text tool. Notice which tools are selected on the left-hand side of the screen. First is the "A" tool, which lets you drag a box to write text in, and below that is a tool which lets you select what kind of background you want behind your text; white, or transparent? In the image itself, you can see why having a white background can be problematic. Here is the correct, or at least CLEANER way to lay down text. Using the transparent background allows you to lay down text without disturbing the image in the background. Extremely useful! Now what's left? You have to save your screenie, silly! In the top left corner of the screen, click on "File" and then go down to "Save As..." and click again. You should see something like the following... First, find a place to save your pictures where you'll know to find them later. Then, instead of leaving the pictured untitled, give them a name! After that, all you have to do is decide what format to save them in. Click on the box below the name, and you should get a drop-down menu of options, ranging from BMPs to TIFs. The safest web formats for pictures that will keep them to a small file size is JPEG, GIF, and PNG. It's usually safe to save under GIF, but for higher quality, JPEG and PNG are okay, but it also means a larger file size. What you use depends wholly on how complicated your screenies are. How many colors does it have? What is its canvas size? You'll have to learn these things as you go, because there's no hard and fast rules for what's best. :) Now that you've got a screenie saved up, all you need to do now is find a place where you can host it so you can put it up on a petpage!