xfce4-screenshooter - Usage

• Taking a screenshot
• After capturing
• Host on Imgur
• Command-line options

To launch the application, use the Screenshot item in the Accessories category of Xfce's main menu.

The Region to capture section allows you to set what the screenshot will be taken of:

Entire screen

Takes a screenshot of the whole screen as you see it.

Active window

Takes a screenshot of the active window. This will be the one that was active before this dialog appeared, or if you set a delay, the one that is active after the delay.

Select a region

Allows you to select a region to be captured by clicking and dragging a rectangle over the area of screen that you wish to capture, before releasing the mouse button. You can also press Ctrl while dragging to move the rectangle.

Capture the mouse pointer

This option allows you to select whether the screenshot will include the mouse pointer.

Capture the window border

This option allows you to select whether the screenshot will include the window border. Only available for the Active window region.

For an explanation about Preferences, please consult Custom Actions.

The Delay before capturing section allows you to set the delay that will elapse between pressing the OK button and screenshot being taken. This delay will allow you to open menus or to perform whatever action you require to see displayed in the screenshot.

Back to Top

After pressing the OK button a second window will be displayed:

Action

The Preview section displays a thumbnail of the screenshot.

The Action section allows you to choose what should be performed on the screenshot.

Save

The Save option will save the screenshot to a PNG file. A save dialog will be displayed. You will be able to set the save location, and the name of the file.

Xfce4 Screenshooter is also able to save the screenshot to any remote file system supported by GVfs, such as FTP, SAMBA, SFTP, remote computers accessible via SSH… You just need to connect this remote file system using gvfs-connect or Gigolo and it will be available in the left column of the save dialog.

Copy to the clipboard

The Copy to the clipboard option allows you to paste the screenshot in another application, such as a word processor. This option is only available when a clipboard manager is running.

Open with

The Open with option saves the screenshot to the system's temporary directory and opens it with the application chosen from the drop-down list. Applications which support images are automatically detected and added to the drop-down list.

Custom Action

The Custom Action saves the screenshot to the system's temporary directory and executes the custom action chosen from the drop-down list. Custom Actions are defined in the Preferences dialog, for more details consult Custom Actions.

Host on Imgur

The Host on Imgur option allow you to host your screenshot on this free online hosting service, so that you can share it easily with other people. Imgur automatically generates a tiny, medium, and full-size image of your screenshot, which can be used to create thumbnails pointing to the full size screenshot.

Since 1.9.9 a hidden option is available to toggle the visibility of “Host on Imgur” in the action list, useful for whoever wants to avoid accidental usages. This option is called enable_imgur_upload, accepts true or false as value and can be defined in ~/.config/xfce4/xfce4-screenshooter. Notice that your distribution may set this option to false by default.

Back to Top

After selecting Host on Imgur and pressing the OK button, you will be shown this dialog:

Imgur image link

The dialog below will give you the links to the full size screenshot, the large thumbnail, the small thumbnails, as well examples of HTML, Markdown and BBcode to create a thumbnail pointing to the full size screenshot:

Imgur Embed into code dialog

The dialog below will give you the links to delete the image off of the Imgur website. The link will only be shown once. Make sure to save it if you think you might be deleting this image:

Imgur deletion dialog

Linking images of Imgur accounts is not currently supported.

Back to Top

Command line options allow you to take screenshots quickly. They also allow you to configure the Print Screen key on the upper right of most keyboards so that it takes screenshots. To do so, configure the key-bindings of your desktop environment so that it launches xfce4-screenshooter with one or several of the following options when the Prt Scrn key is pressed.

The -w option

The -w or –window option allows you to take a screenshot of the active window.

The -f option

The -f or –fullscreen option allows you to take a screenshot of the entire screen.

The -r option

The -r or –region option allows you to select a region to be captured by clicking and dragging a rectangle over the area of screen that you wish to capture, before releasing the mouse button.

The -d option

The -d or –delay option followed by a positive integer allows you to set the delay before taking the screenshot when the -w, -f or -r option is given.

The -s option

The -s or –save option followed by the path to an existing folder allows you to set where the screenshots are saved. The filename and extension can optionally be passed. This option only has an effect if the -w, -f or -r option is given.

The -S option

If the -S or –save option is given, the saved screenshot is shown in the file manager. This option only has an effect if the -s option is given.

The -o option

If the -o or –open option is given, followed by an application name, the screenshot will be saved to the system's temporary directory and opened with the application whose name is to be given after -o. This option only has an effect if the -w, -f or -r option is given.

The -i option

If the -i or –imgur option is given, the screenshot will be hosted on Imgur. See above for more details. This option only has an effect if the -w, -f or -r option is given.

The -c option

If the -c or –clipboard option is given, the screenshot will be copied to the system clipboard. This option only has an effect if the -w, -f or -r option is given.

The --no-border option

If the –no-border option is given, the window borders are removed from the screenshot.

The --supported-formats option

If the –supported-formats option is given, all the supported image formats will be listed, results can vary depending on installed pixbuf loaders. This option cancels out the other options, prints the list and the program exits.

Here is a small collection of examples demonstrating what is possible to accomplish with little shell-fu and some creativity. Some of the commands below were extracted from feature requests to add very specific solutions, which would bloat xfce4-screenshooter's UI but are easily doable with command line. For increased convenience, it is also possible to assign keyboard shortcuts to commands with the help of xfce4-keyboard-settings or add launchers to xfce4-panel.

# Take fullscreen screenshot and save to desktop without asking the file name
xfce4-screenshooter -f -s "$HOME/Desktop/Screenshot_$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S).png"

# Take screenshots at regular intervals and stop after 8 captures
# repeat is a zsh built-in function, use for or while when using other shells
repeat 8 sh -c 'xfce4-screenshooter -f -s ~/Desktop/$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S).png; sleep 5.25'

Back to Top

Back to xfce4-screenshooter main page