GtkGrab takes screenshots and automatically uploads them. GtkGrab is split up into two components, the client and the server. You can find the server component on http://github.com/kokx/GtkGrab-server.
Version 0.3.2, Created by Evan Coury and Pieter Kokx.
If you are updating GtkGrab, you probably need to update your config.cfg
(see the samples).
GtkGrab is an open source tool for Linux and Mac that takes a screenshot of a window or specified area of the screen, uploads it to a web server of your choice, and copies the URL to your clipboard automatically. Once you start using it, you'll wonder how you got along without it. GtkGrab is essentially a free and open source version of the commercial TinyGrab.com software/service, except that it also works on Linux and you don't have to pay to use your own server. The name GtkGrab implies that it may only work in GTK-based desktop environment such as Gnome, however this is no longer the case (though it was originally). To be clear, GtkGrab has been tested to work on Linux running both Gnome and KDE as well as on Mac OSX.
- Press your specified keyboard shortcut.
- On Linux: Either click and drag to specify an area of the screen to capture, or click on the title of a window to capture just that window.
- On Mac: Use the space bar to toggle between mouse and window selection modes.
- Within a few seconds, you should get an unobtrusive notification that your screenshot has been uploaded and that the URL has been copied to your clipboard.
For Arch Linux, there is a PKGBUILD available on the AUR.
Note that you still have to configure GtkGrab.
First, make sure you have all dependencies installed:
- python2.7
- xclip
- Screenshot program (scrot by default)
Download the latest release from the releases page, or use git to obtain the latest (development) version.
Finally, go to the directory where you have downloaded and unpacked the source to, and run:
python setup.py install --optimize=1- Install Growl and growlnotify from http://growl.info/
- Use automator to run
GtkGrabvia the keyboard shortcut of your choice. Instructions for this can be found here, except where it says to select "Launch Application", you should select "Run Shell Script" instead.
Now you should configure GtkGrab using one of the sample configuration files
in /usr/share/GtkGrab-client/.
When you have configured GtkGrab, you can execute the GtkGrab command to
test it.
In GNOME, you can configure the GtkGrab command as a shortcut via System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts.
By default, GtkGrab uses scrot for making screenshots. And it will, by
default, only make screenshots of a selected area. But there is a 'command'
configuration directive. You can change this to any screenshot command that
saves a screenshot to the given path %s.
GtkGrab supports using s3cmd (available in ruby-gems) to upload screenshots
to Amazon S3. This feature still has to be documented properly for usage with
the installed GtkGrab.
GtkGrab optionally supports recording an animated GIF of your screen. This requires a few extra dependencies to work properly:
- zenity for prompting how long to record for.
- xrectsel for selecting the area to record.
- byzanz for actually recording the gif (available in the Fedora base repo).
Currently, due to laziness, it uploads the gifs as png files, but they still display fine in any modern browser.
Also due to laziness, the gif support only works on Linux, not Mac. Mac/Windows support could be possible via LICEcap possibly.
To use GtkGrab in gif mode, simply invoke it with GtkGrab gif.
- P: After taking a screenshot no notification is displayed, when running it from the command line the error 'sh: notify-send: not found'
- A: Install notify-osd libnotify-bin via your package manager
- P: ImportError: No module named ConfigParser
- A: GtkGrab wants python2 but your default is python3, you need to change the
first line in
GtkGrabto point to your python2, /usr/bin/python2 for example - P: Binding a keyboard shortcut in GNOME doesn't work.
- A: This is an issue with scrot. To solve this, try setting the command option
in the config file to
sleep 0.5 && scrot --b -s %s. For more information see this and this and this and this.
GtkGrab is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL)
Version 3. See
COPYING file for details.