Flamory is a free-for-personal-use research tool which allows recording and searching web pages and local files.
This starts with a simple screenshot function. When you’re viewing an interesting website or document, press Ctrl+Alt+A to take a screenshot, and it’s saved locally.
Open the viewer later and you’re able to browse captures and annotate them with a pen, shapes, pointers or text captions.
This isn’t just about images. Flamory also saves the text content of the file or page, and a search tool enables finding any snapshot by words from its content.
Once you’ve found what you need, you’re able to switch from the screenshot to a full document view with a click. Alternatively, double-clicking any website capture launches the site in your default browser, at the correct place in the source document (if your capture was from somewhere at the bottom of a lengthy web page, for instance, that should be where you go).
There’s some integration with Google and Chrome. When you run a Google search, Flamory can optionally search your snapshots (this is turned off by default). If there’s a match, a thin blue strip appears at the right of the screen, and right-clicking this displays any results.
A bonus “sticky notes” feature allows annotating pages with a few simple text notes. Press Win+Shift+A to capture, enter a sentence or two, and you’re done. Whenever you revisit that page, the notes are displayed in a popup, and they’re also visible in the main snapshot library.
That library is normally displayed as a long list, with no organisation, no way to manually tag snapshots or shift them to folders. There is a Topic system which automatically displays related captures when you hit the Topic button, and this is smarter than we expected, but we’d like some manual filing options as well.
We found some inconsistencies with the program, too. Sticky notes worked mostly, but not always; Flamory captures regular applications as well as browsers, but couldn’t always relaunch them later.
Despite that, on balance Flamory is a likeable tool with a good range of features, and if you’re interested in the idea then give it a try.
Flamory is a free application for Windows XP and later.
Your Comments & Opinion