• Shutter’s feature list includes:
• Fullscreen, window, area screenshots
• Website screenshots
• GNOME integration with tray icon
• Session collection (each screenshot will be opened in a different tab in the Shutter window)
• Embedded drawing tool
• Upload/Export tool

I have used many tools for screenshots before. Shutter, however, blows them all away. No it is not as simple as hitting the PrntScr button, but it is far more flexible and powerful than anything like it. With that said, let’s install this tool and see how it’s used.

Getting and installing

I will be installing this in Ubuntu 9.04, so this tutorial will reflect that choice. You won’t find Shutter in your standard repository. You have to add the Ubuntu PPA repository. To do this you need to open up a terminal window and issue the command:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

You want to add the following to the bottom of that file:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/shutter/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/shutter/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Once you’ve added the repository you will need to then add the PPA gpg key with the following command:
wget -q http://shutter-project.org/shutter-ppa.key -O- | sudo apt-key add -

With the key added you can now update your sources with the command:

sudo apt-get update

and then install Shutter with the command:

sudo apt-get install shutter

Accept the dependencies and let apt-get do its thing. Shutter will be installed and you are ready to go.

Using Shutter

Figure 1

Basic usage of Shutter is simple:

1. Open up the tool from the Accessories sub-menu of the Accessories menu.
2. From the main window (see Figure 1) click the button that corresponds with the type of screenshot you want to take.
3. Save the screenshot in the filetype you desire

Here are some notes specific to each type of screenshot you will take:

Selection: When you opt to take a screenshot of only a section of your screen the screen will dim and an instructional window will appear telling you exactly what to do. You can scroll in to enlarge a section but this does not appear in your screenshot.

Full Screen: The full screen screenshot will not include Shutter in the picture.

Window:  A hand cursor will appear for you to click on the window you want to take the screenshot of.

Figure 2

For the most part Shutter works exactly as you would expect. There are some nifty features that you might not be aware of. For example, Shutter has an outstanding set of plugins to take advantage of. To use the plugins click on the Screenshot menu and select the Execute a Plugin entry. This will open up a new window (see Figure 2) where you can select a plugin to use. Say, for example, you wanted to add a watermark to your screenshot. You can do this by first taking the screenshot, and then opening up the Plugins window and selecting the Watermark plugin. You can then be specific about what you want your watermark to say, where you want it, and what font size you want.

There are a number of other cool plugins to use. Scroll through the list and play around to see which ones you like.

Website screenshots

Taking a screenshot of a website is simple. Click on the Web button and then enter the URL you want to snag. There is one thing you should know about taking a screenshot of a web site: Depending upon how long the page is, the screenshots can get rather tall. Taking a screenshot of the Ghacks page renders an image that is 1025×3459 pixels in size. Fairly large for a screenshot. Of course you can crop that image to use only what you need.

Final thoughts

Shutter is one of the finest screenshot tools available to Linux. If you haven’t used it you should immediately install it and use it. Be warned, you will wind up spending a lot time playing around with Shutter. It’s handy and it’s fun.

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In this article you will learn how to take screenshots with the help of The Gimp, the GNOME menu, the Print Screen button, and ImageMagick. Each way has its advantages, so it’ll be up to you to decide which method suits you best. With that said, lets’ dive in head first.

ImageMagick

I wanted to start with this method because it can be a little flaky. The primary issue is that ImageMagick has trouble with Compiz. If you’re not running Compiz, you won’t have any issues with this method. Otherwise you’d be best served to skip down to The GIMP.

One of the benefits of this method is you can use it to grab screenshots automatically. You could even set up a cron job to take screen shots at specific times, or log into a machine remotely and snap a shot. I won’t get into the “why” you would want to do this – decide that yourself.

The basic command for taking a snapshot with ImageMagick is:

import FILENAME.png

Pretty simple. The only catch with the above command is that you will have to specify what portion of the screen to grab. When you issue that command a cross-hair will appear which you click and drag to select what portion of the screen to grab. There is an easier way. If you want to take this screenshot without interaction you issue the command:

import -window root FILENAME.png

What the above command does is take a screenshot of the root window (that’s the entire screen basically.) The screenshot will be saved (in the case of the example above) as FILENAME.png

Print screen

This one is simple (and not much different than using the GNOME menu)  you press the Print Screen button. When you do a window will open (see Figure 1) asking you to give the file a name, decide on a destination, and click save.  You can save the screenshot in .jpg, .png (default), .tiff, .gif, and .bmp formats. From this same window you can also copy the image to the clipboard for later use.

GNOME Menu

If you look in the Accessories subment of the GNOME Applications menu you will see the entry “Take Screenshot”. If you click on this the same window will open that opened when you hit the Print Screen key. This works in the exact same way. If, for some reason, you have a different keyboard mapping or a Print Screen key that does not work, this menu entry is sure to work.

The GIMP

Figure 1

The GIMP is my standard means for snapping screenshots.  Within The GIMP click on the File menu and then click on the Create submenu. From within the Create menu click the Screenshot entry which will open up the screenshot dialog (see Figure 1).

There are three types of screenshots you can take:

Single Window: This will grab only the window you click on after you click the Snap button.

Entire Screen: This will grab the entire screen after you click the Snap button.

Select a Region: This allows you to select the portion of the screen you want to grab after you click snap.

You can also configure a delay (in seconds) which will allow you to open up menus or take an action to grab.

When using The GIMP for screenshots you will have to save the image manually. But you can also edit the image before you save it.

Final thoughts

As you can see there are a number of ways to grab a screenshot in the Linux desktop. Each method is simple and should have you snagging screenshots all day long.

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Snippy (via Technospot) provides the option to do freehand screenshots that can take any form the user wants. It looks much like cutting the important part of a website or application like you would cut a newspaper article.

A click on the Snippy icon changes the mouse cursor to a pen that can be used to encircle the area that the user wants to save, rectangular areas can still be saved by pressing the shift key. The final area will be send to the clipboard right away, if it was taken on a website the url of the website will also be send to the clipboard.

The software supports multiple monitors and the use of hotkeys to start the capturing process. Definitely an interesting program that has a size of only 84 Kilobyte.

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By default a new screenshot is created every 5 seconds in png format that is covering the whole screen. The taking of new screenshots can be started and stopped in the application and it is definitely a good idea to pause while entering user data or other personal data.

The user can select several different formats for the screenshots and play the “movies” on a day by day basis. The program can be configured to delete images that are older than a selected number of days.

I can see some uses for this, for example to create a production diary when working in applications like Photoshop or a video editing application. The pro version comes with several handy features like excluding certain applications from the process.

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CmdCapture is a small command line tool that can make screenshots of the current command line. Since it is a command line tool it is driven by parameters which are explained when entering CmdCapture.exe /h.

The easiest way to create a screenshot of the command line is to run the application without parameters. It will save a screenshot in the same directory in png format with the date and time attached to the filename.

Three additional parameters are supported by the software. The parameter /f can be used to pick a custom filename and file extension. Supported are png, jpg, bmp, tif and xpm.

The /d parameter can be used to specify another directory for the created screenshots. Finally the /q parameter changes the jpg quality level which makes only sense if jpg is used as the file format.

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The software only works with Quicktime compatible formats. Basic use essentially means picking a movie and clicking on the Go button. There are some advanced parameters the user can play around with like thumbnail size, number of columns or snapshot interval.

Matthew Merkovich created a gallery of images that he created with Thumber including Black Hawk Down, Bulletproof Monk and Equilibrium.

Falls into the modern art category, don’t you think ?

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If so, meet an interesting start-up called ScrnShots. Besides having a fancy 2.0 name it provides you with a few effective tools for keeping the screenshots you take in order and for ease of linking to them and embedding them into a web page. One of such tools would definitely be tagging that can be applied on each image to make it easier for you to find your way to it later on. The function allowing the user to view existing screenshots in an orderly manner through the web interface surely comes in handy too but the thing I find most useful about this service is that it prepares a few links to various sizes of the picture for you to simply copy&paste these into your site to have the pictures embedded as links which take you to the host upon clicking them. Here, viewers can leave comments on your screenshots and view them in full size. One last thing especially addicted screenshotters could appreciate is getting a personal RSS feed updating anyone who should be interested in new shots you take and a partly customizable widget made up of 1 up to 10 thumbnails of your latest “artwork”.

ScrnShots preview:

All this would be kind of clumsy if you had to use ScrnShots’ online uploader every time you want to share a screenshot. Fortunately there’s a very lightweight (5 files) desktop version of the uploader available for download from here that makes it possible to snap certain area on your screen and tag/describe the image before uploading it. There are versions for both Windows and Mac, however, I got an error message when trying to run it on my system. Hopefully that only happened on account of the application being a 0.7Beta and the new version to come will be working properly. If you do give it a try, please let me know whether the desktop uploader worked for you or not.

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The typical process after configuring the settings in SHUP looks like the following. The user presses a hotkey which either takes a screenshot of the desktop or the active window. That screenshot is then displayed in a basic image editor where it is possible to resize the image, change the filename, tags, image format or use a rectangle to edit and upload only a selection of the image.

The image will then be automatically uploaded to the default file hoster and the url of that image automatically pasted into the clipboard. That’s a fast and easy way of creating and uploading screenshots.

Six file hosters are currently supported including Flickr, ImageShack and Photobucket. Some require usernames and passwords that have to be added in the configuration, the upload will obviously fail otherwise.

My suggestion would be to turn off all those confirmations  to speed up the process a little bit. Shup adds itself to the right-click menu as well. Whenever you right-click an image you can access SHUP and use it to upload the file to an image hoster which is a very nice bonus.

I was not able to figure out how to upload images directly without having to open the image editor first. Think that is not possible.

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Visitors can browse the screenshots by using the tagcloud at the top of the main page, by browsing the pages that display twelve screenshots each or by browsing the random images that are shown in the left sidebar. That’s pretty much all I can say right now about Social Shots.

What I like is the tagged approach which makes it easy to find screenshots of games that you like or want to play and the easy way to navigate the website. The biggest con is probably that there is not much content yet, only fourteen pages of screenshots which means there are currently less than 200 screenshots available.

I guess it could become a pretty solid niche website if they manage to interest enough active users who upload screenshots regularly. Getting their hands on “soon-to-come” game screenshots would probably boost the traffic quite a lot.

Read More:

Social Shots

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I therefor decided to look for an easier way to resize the images and I found it in the software Image Resizer. All I need to do now is to select all images that I want to be resized and click on ok to process them all. I did create a new image profile before to add the best fitting size for my website and saved that as the standard profile that will be used when resizing images.

Image Resizer offers several other functions that could be useful for some users. It is possible to choose the output file format, the output quality, the name of the newly created images, watermarks and if the new images should overwrite the original ones and where they should be saved if not.

Read More:

Image Resizer

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That’s when I found the freeware Screenshot Captor which does everything I need, and more. With Screenshot Captor it is possible to grab the complete screen, part of the screen, a fixed size or the active window using hotkeys. If you simply press the print key it grabs the current screen for instance. Whenever you’ve done that you see a little default box with some options in it, for instance save the image, create thumbnail, discard image and so on.

If you discard the image it is shown in the main window of screenshot captor and you can work with it. You could for instance add text to the screenshot and highlight or blurr regions. This is definately the best screenshot tool for my purposes, it is fast and has everything that I need to speed up the process and still have great screenshots for my blogs.

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