Tuesday 11 August 2009

Shutter - Powerful Screenshot Tool for Linux

GNOME has a basic screenshot application called gnome-screenshot, KDE has an advanced one called KSnapshot, which includes options to take screenshots of selected regions, fullscreen, or window under cursor, with or without a time delay (for taking screenshots of menus for example). But neither one of them compares to Shutter, a complex screenshot tool with many features, and the possibility to edit and apply effects directly from within it.

Shutter 0.80.1

Shutter allows you to take screenshots of the fullscreen, a specified window, a section of window or just a screen region. It will save all the screenshots taken in the current session and will allow you to either save them to the local hard drive, supporting many formats, including PNG and JPG, or to directly upload them to imageshack.us, imagebanana.com or ubuntu-pics.de. Even FTP uploads are alowed.

The nice powerful features of Shutter include the ability to edit and perform various effects on the screenshot. For example, some of the effects plugins it comes with are:
- 3D rotate, rotate the image offering a 3D effect
- negate, replaces every pixel with its complementary colour
- sepia, colour your screenshot using the sepia effect
- PDF export, to export your screenshot to PDF

And many more are available too. You can even print to PDF or PostScript, and Shutter will also allow taking screenshots of web pages.


The Preferences window will allow to customise various aspect of Shutter, like the name and format of the saved image, actions, capture delay (which is important if you want to take screenshots of menus), include or not window border, tray integration, global shortcut for taking screenshots in GNOME, upload services and plugins.

Shutter is an awesome tool, and if you take screenshots a lot, it will surely prove more useful than the default application GNOME comes with.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

You can try "Screenie" too is really nice!