Before you know it, it looks like a whole year has passed now from the first public revision of GScrot (what Shutter was previously known as) was published on April 9, 2008, at 21:19. Shutter one year old now! It seems that time passed so quickly, so lets look at what was accomplished in the last year.

why was it started

As Mario started to work in the quality assurance department of a local IT-company, he started looking for some a neat screenshot application – because there is a lot of documentation and bug tracking work to be done where screenshots are essential.

There were some apps like ksnapshot, gnome-screenshot etc. but they all focus on a single screenshot; no editing features, no session, no uploading, no nice effects etc. So he started to develop Shutter (formerly gscrot) with these features and goals in mind.

timeline of the project

The plugins system was one of the first major features that were implemented. It was now possible to add effects like drop shadows, polaroid etc. to the screenshots. Most of these plugins are still available in the latest version of Shutter.

ubuntu-pics.de was the first image hoster that was supported by the new upload functionality added to Shutter in the following weeks.

Shutter was a little frontend for scrot at first but it moved very fast and while there were more and more feature requests scrot was dropped and a standalone backend was implemented. This step made it possible to add advanced features like the zoom-window, window selection by name and last but not least the advanced selection tool.

Another milestone is the drawing tool that was requested by so many users and was introduced in the 0.6x series of Shutter. There was no need to start image manipulation tools like The Gimp after capturing a screenshot anymore just if you wanted to highlight some thing or add arbitrary graphics to your image.

pics of the first release

One of the very first implementations. Scrot console parameters turned into graphical switches

The first release (still named XScrot - the very first code name).

That’s all!  Now you know a bit more about Shutter. Enjoy it