About

Shutter is a feature-rich screenshot program for Linux based operating systems such as Ubuntu. You can take a screenshot of a specific area, window, your whole screen, or even of a website – apply different effects to it, draw on it to highlight points, and then upload to an image hosting site, all within one window. Shutter is free, open-source, and licensed under GPL v3.

Capture

Shutter allows you to capture nearly anything on your screen without loosing control over your screenshots (tabbed interface). Here is an overview of what you can do with Shutter:

  • Capture a Specific Area
    This allows you to select an arbitrary region of your screen and capture only those parts you really need. Shutter offers two different tools to do so in order to meet any user’s taste.
  • Capture your Desktop
    Shutter
    does not only capture all the contents of your desktop (or workspace) – it also supports Multi-monitor settings, e.g. capture the active monitor
  • Capture a Window
    Simply use your mouse to select the window you want to capture. Shutter will highlight the currently select window in an attractive and useful way. It is even possible to simply select a window from a list and capture it right a way.
  • Capture a Menu or Tooltip
    Capturing menus or tooltips is very easy with Shutter. You select one of the options and a (user-defined) countdown starts. During this time you can open the desired menu or let a specific tooltip come up. Shutter will recognize and capture it.
  • Capture a Website
    Shutter uses gnome-web-photo to capture a website without opening a browser window

Edit

Especially if you are taking screenshots for writing tutorials or manuals you need to edit the image, e.g. highlighting some part of it. With Shutter you don’t need to open an external graphics editor like GIMP, because Shutter ships with its own built-in editor. Here are some of the most important features:

  • Add Text, Arrows, Rectangles, Ellipses…
    The built-in editor allows you to add primitives (e.g. rectangles, lines etc.) , arrows or text to your screenshot. Every shape can be customized by changing the color, fonts and/or the line width.
  • Censor / Pixelize to Hide Private Data
    Don’t want to show sensitive data like IP or e-Mail addresses? Shutter gives you two simple but effective tools to hide this data.
  • Auto-Increment Shape
    When writing a step-by-step guide people often add incremental digits to the screenshots (usually via text). Shutter offers a specific auto-increment shape that can be added to the screenshot. It cannot be easier!
  • Crop
    The built-in editor also includes a tool to crop your screenshot. Simply select a region with your mouse or enter the desired dimensions into the input fields.

Share

We all spend much of our time in forums, wikis, chats etc. From time to time we need to do some screenshots and upload them so we can share them with other people.

  • Share easily
    Shutter has a built-in function to upload your screenshot with nice link-formatting so you can post the generated link directly in the forum, wiki etc.
  • Join the Cloud
    The latest version of Shutter supports Ubuntu One as well.

Plugins

Shutter ships with a great variety of plugins that allow you to add impressive effects to your screenshots.

  • Give Unique Look to Your Screenshots
    A picture is worth a thousand words.



58 Comments

  1. It would be great, if shutter could has feature to merge two screenshots. So that we could easily overlap one screenshot over the other and point out the differences.

  2. Looks really useful, any ETA on a new version or..? I notice this post is from a few years ago, I use this tool to help build car websites.

    Yours truly,
    Brian @ http://busamcincinnati.com/

  3. can i use shutter to take screenshot, add title and descriptins then upload to my own website?

  4. What version added post-capture editor with crop, pixelization of area, ading text and similar? I’m using Debian unstable with 0.85 version. I have always started GIMP to do this manipulations, but this is time consuming, and always wanted to have this built-into shutter. So was it 0.87? Any idea if Debian package will be updated?

    • Ah, apt-get install libgoo-canvas-perl, solved my problem! Why the hell this package do not install be default with shutter using Depends!? I understand it would work without it, but why anybody would not install it?

      • Romario

        This is not a bug in Shutter – it is just the way the official packages are build.
        I have already contacted Debian’s maintainer, but he is not responding. In Ubuntu this is solved and the package is very up-to-date as well. Ubuntu’s maintainer tried to get his changes into Debian as well – but again, no luck.

  5. Is there a date/time plugin in Shutter?

    I want to have the date and time on each screenshot for QA purposes.

    TIA

  6. Romario

    @Samundra
    Sounds like a good reason to learn Perl! No, seriously…please see my answer here:
    /2008/10/upload-your-screenshots-to-flickr/#comment-3875

  7. Hey developers !

    I wanted to extend Shutter’s upload feature by writing my own lines of codes in Python. Can I do that ? I found that all files in uploads are written in Perl.

    If we could write our own piece of code and integrate it to Shutter then that would be awesome. Obviously, There are many of us who will be more then happy to contribute to Shutter.

    with best regards,
    Samundra

  8. Romario

    @loomsen
    I am working on it. This will be included in the next version (hopefully).

  9. loomsen

    Erm embarrassed *push*

    Any news on the log for uploaded files yet? :)

  10. Romario

    Carlos :

    Is it possible to leave a rectangular area or capture unchanged for the next screensot?

    This is already possible in the latest version (0.86 and later).

    Carlos :
    And, better, add to application a mode of creating series of screensot with the same capturing parameters after specified interval? Use case: I want create screenshots of 10 different tabs of one window. I should set rectangular area once, set interval (for example 1-2 second), push button and create 10 screenshots into files named like file_1, file_2, … Between every screenshot I expected to do some simple task such as switch to the next tab with the mouse or keyboard. It would be really greate!
    +1

    This is not implemented yet, but it is planned for future versions.



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