Take screenshots on Ubuntu with Shutter
Prelude: Why write about a screenshot tool?
It is a mistake to think that only “big” things (supported hardware, multimedia codecs, office applications and data conversion) matter when you want to successfully switch to an alternative operating system. For true happinessTM, the small things are as, or even more, important – the things that make your daily work routine run smoothly and that you’ll only miss once you don’t have them anymore…
Taking screenshots is one of these small things. Everybody who develops digital tools and applications for end users will sooner or later reach the point where good visual documentation is needed – no matter how intuitive the user interface might be. And everybody who ever had to compile such an illustrated manual or wiki knows just how helpful a good screenshot tool is.
Running linux, this was one of the small things I always missed…
Enter Shutter
Shutter (formerly known as GScrot) has recently been released in version 0.70.2 and is, despite its short history, already the best linux screenshot tool around, IMO. But let’s have a closer look at what makes Shutter a screenshot tool deluxe:
Basic functionality: taking screenshots
With shutter, you can
- capture a selected area from your screen. You have two options:
- in simple mode, you click in the screen, hold the mouse button and draw a rectangle. On releasing the mouse button, the selected area is captured. For better orientation, Shutter zooms the region around the cursor and shows the coordinates and the dimensions of the area selected so far.
- in extended mode, you also draw a rectangle area as described before, but you can modify its dimensions before it is captured. For better orientation, Shutter fades out the parts of the screen that you did not select.
- capture your entire screen.
- capture single windows. And it is easy, instead of having to arrange them manually on your desktop, Shutter offers you a list of all existing windows and you simply pick the one you want to capture.
- capture window parts. With this option, Shutter lets you easily select only parts of a window, e.g. Firefox’s navigation bar.
- capture a complete website. All you need is the URL of the web page you want to capture. Shutter takes a screenshot of the whole page, no matter what size – so no more patching of multiple screenshots for long pages.
You can fine tune these basic functions. If you need to arrange something on your screen before you capture it, define a specific delay time. If you need to take a whole series of screenshots that document a specific process, define a wildcard naming pattern – Shutter offers you auto-increment wildcard values as well as timestamps. If you need the mouse cursor in your screenshots, turn it on – if not, turn it off. All these preferences can be saved to your profile(s).
All taken screenshots will be added to a session where you can quickly access them for further editing.
Advanced functionality: editing screenshots
Shutter not only lets you take screenshots, it also offers basic image editing capabilties. These cannot replace full-featured graphic applications like GIMP, but offer a toolbox with very useful functions that help to emphasize the point you are trying to convey with your screenshot:
- Annotations: put your comments in your screenshot
- graphic symbols: choose from a plenitude of symbols to add to your screenshots (e.g. arrows, exclamation marks) – or import your own
- graphic primitives: draw lines, rectangles or ellipses to highlight certain parts of your screenshot
- Censorship: blur sensitive information in your screenshot to render it illegible
An example:
These functions will suffice in most cases – but should you require more advanced image processing, you can always launch the desired application (e.g. GIMP) from within Shutter.
The bonus: more functionality through plugins
Shutter is extensible through a plugin architecture and already comes with some plugins that you can apply to your screenshots. Depending on your needs you might use them more or less often, but they are definitely nice to have. At the moment there are > 10 plugins available, providing PDF export functionality, stylish frames and nice effects.
The result of the Polaroid plugin:
For the potential and advantages of a plugin-based application desgin one only has to look at the Firefox Webbrowser and the activity it has sparked in the developer community. It will be interesting to see what other Shutter plugins will appear in the future – the developers welcome creative ideas.
Install Shutter
Shutter packages exist for most popular Linux distributions, and Ubuntu users can even add the project’s Launchpad repository to their sources and receive updates. Links to the packages, as well as to Shutter’s Launchpad site, can be found on the Shutter download page; in addition, there is a detailed guide on how to add the repository to your Ubuntu sources.
Happy documenting!
Article written by Gregor Geiermann of openinformation.org and licensed under BA-SA 3.0.
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This site is intended for users, looking for solutions, fixes, tweaks to get things working just they way they should. User experiences are all here along with other helpful information for the new and experienced Linux (Ubuntu) user. 
Don’t know what’s going wrong but EVERY post on your blog, when I click “read more” shows this:
Who does this content really belong to? NOT THIS SITE, but , from where it was stolen.
*****CONTENT THEFT HAS BEEN DETECTED***** It appears the site, application or browser plugin you are using is not properly accessing the content or is trying to place the content in a frame (which is not the proper way to do this). Please visit Take screenshots on Ubuntu with Shutter at Ubuntu Linux Help to get the ACTUAL CONTENT of this post, or to ASK FOR PERMISSION TO REDISTRIBUTE that content.
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@Homitsu
What application are you using to read it?
(If it’s on another site or in a frame, the leech protection scripting will display this warning.)
Just Firefox!
I’ve got your RSS in GoogleReader; when I see there is a new article, I just click the title and it opens your site in a new window…
@Homitsu
I can see it in GoogleReader (on different boxes) at this end. The only thing I can think of is that your browser is opening it in frames, if so, that is leaching – Which the scripting will catch. The feed URL changed to a new feed (so this might also be causing issues?)
The correct feed is: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ubuntulinuxhelp/ERrG
I’m not sure (because I have no way to test this), but I think people who subscribed to the old feed, before the new one started working, might be the ones effected by this?
Finally, there are some “User Agents” that are blacklisted. If your browser is using one of them, then it will receive that “Content theft” message.
Hello,
Check also Gscreendump. It is also a screenshot taking app but it have more advanced way to manipulate images. It has also revision-system that lets you rollback changes you do not like. Check it. It’s really awesome!
http://code.google.com/p/gscreendump/
Installation instructions on the wiki-page.
Thanks for detailed review.
For my new article I have to take many screenshots and the gnome screenshot utility cant capture the active window screenshots with compiz enabled. The work-around is to disable compiz temporary which is a bit of hassel.
Shutter can take screenshots of windows with compiz enabled. So yes, that helps a lot.
I find Shutter is not working for me. Image quality is not high and I cannot select screen areas. I don’t use it anymore (I just haven taken the time to remove it yet).