Flameshot – A Simple, Yet Powerful, Feature-rich Screenshot Tool For Linux

Capturing screenshots is part of my job. I have been using Ksnip and Deepin-screenshot tool for taking screenshots. They are simple, light-weight and quite neat screenshot tools. Both of them come with all options such as smart window identification, shortcuts supporting, image editing, delay screenshot, social sharing, smart saving, and image resolution adjusting etc. Today, I stumbled upon yet another screenshot tool that ships with many useful features. Say hello to Flameshot, a simple and powerful, feature-rich screenshot tool for Linux and Unix-like operating systems.

Flameshot is easy to use, customizable and has an option to upload your screenshots to imgur, an online image sharing website. And also, Flameshot has a CLI version, so you can take screenshots from commandline as well.

Flameshot is completely free and open source tool. In this guide, we will see how to install Flameshot and how to use Flameshot tool to take screenshots, and edit screenshots in Linux.

Install Flameshot in Linux

Flameshot is packaged for several Linux distributions and is available in the default repositories.

On Arch Linux:

Flameshot is available [community] repository in Arch Linux. Make sure you have enabled community repository and install Flameshot using pacman as shown below.

$ sudo pacman -S flameshot

It is also available in AUR, so you can install it using any AUR helper programs, for example Paru or Yay, in Arch-based systems.

$ paru -S flameshot-git

Or,

$ yay -S flameshot-git

On Fedora:

$ sudo dnf install flameshot

On Debian 10+ and Ubuntu 18.04+, install it using APT package manager.

$ sudo apt install flameshot

On openSUSE:

$ sudo zypper install flameshot

On other distributions, compile and install it from source code. The compilation requires Qt version 5.3 or higher and GCC 4.9.2 or higher.

How to Use Flameshot Screenshot Tool

Launch Flameshot from menu or application launcher. On MATE desktop environment, It usually found under Applications -> Graphics.

Once you opened it, you will see Flameshot systray icon in your system's panel.

Note: If you are using Gnome you need to install the TopIcons extension in order to see the systemtray icon.

Right click on the tray icon and you'll see some menu items to open the configuration window and the information window or quit the application.

To capture screenshot, just click on the tray icon. You will see help window that says how to use Flameshot. Choose an area to capture and hit ENTER key to capture the screen. Press right click to show the color picker, hit spacebar to view the side panel. You can use increase or decrease the pointer's thickness by using the Mouse scroll button.

Flameshot comes with quite good set of features, such as,

• Free hand writing
• Line drawing
• Rectangle / Circle drawing
• Rectangle selection
• Arrows
• Marker to highlight important points
• Add text
• Blur the image/text
• Show the dimension of the image
• Undo/Redo the changes while editing images
• Copy the selection to the clipboard
• Save the selection
• Leave the capture screen
• Choose an app to open images
• Upload the selection to imgur site
• Pin image to desktop

Here is a sample demo for Flameshot usage:

Keyboard Shortcuts

Flameshot supports keyboard shortcuts. Right click on Flameshot tray icon and click Information window to see all the available shortcuts in the graphical capture mode. Here is the list of available keyboard shortcuts in GUI mode.

Shift + drag a handler of the selection area: mirror redimension in the opposite handler.

Flameshot Command Line Options

Flameshot also has a set of command line options to delay the screenshots and save images in custom paths.

To capture screen with Flameshot GUI, run:

$ flameshot gui

To capture screen with GUI and save it in a custom path of your choice:

$ flameshot gui -p ~/myStuff/captures

To open GUI with a delay of 2 seconds:

$ flameshot gui -d 2000

To capture fullscreen with custom save path (no GUI) with a delay of 2 seconds:

$ flameshot full -p ~/myStuff/captures -d 2000

To capture fullscreen with custom save path copying to clipboard:

$ flameshot full -c -p ~/myStuff/captures

To capture the screen containing the mouse and print the image (bytes) in PNG format:

$ flameshot screen -r

To capture the screen number 1 and copy it to the clipboard:

$ flameshot screen -n 1 -c

What do you need more? Flameshot has almost all features for capturing pictures, adding annotations, editing images, blur or highlight important points and a lot more. I think I will stick with Flameshot for a while as I find it best replacement for my current screenshot tool. Give it a try and you won't be disappointed.

Resource:

• Flameshot GitHub Repository