Shutter

Capture pre-defined areas?

Asked by eyerouge

Shutter is my favorite screenshot tool and I use it almost daily - great work guys. While it already has some nice ways to select what and how a screenshot will be taken I lack the following:

A way to pre-define the custom marking-area and keep it pre-defined inbetween screenshots. As it is now I can hand-draw a custom area on the screen and tell Shutter to take a shot of it. However, say that I often take shots of the same area on different occasions - then I have to re-draw the area each time I take a screenshot.

On top of that there is no way to specify in pixels (or other units) what dimension I want the area to have. While it is nice to be able to make a rough hand-drawn one, and while it often is enough when screen capturing, I still believe there are situations where a user wants more control and where it's a big advantage to be able to input the width x height directly or in order to adjust the already drawn area.

For most normal users the already existing methods of taking screenshots will be satisfactory 95% of the time. That said, I think the program would be more complete if it allowed us to, with a single button press (or a combo of buttons) take a screenshot of a pre-defined area of the screen.

An example of usage:

- Take a screenshot of x number of windows that are next to each other and which don't belong to the same program.
- Take a screenshot with x% of one window visible and y% of a another, which is a variant of the above.
- Easily take a screenshot of an area within a program (This is doable today, but you have to re-draw the area every time...)
- Take more precise screenshots, making editing them afterwards less needed and shutter faster to use, giving the user more control over what is shot.

(I haven't found any support for this in scrot and don't know if you're still using it as a base for Shutter. I do however believe you could easily implement this by using ImageMagick after a fullscreen screenshot has been taken and simply cropping according to the specifics you pass on from the users setup in Shutter... just a thought, I don't really care how it's implemented but that's what I discovered when trying to solve the problem..)

So, what I want to know if is you are likely to implement this feature? If you are it would also be nice if a user could save his/her pre-defined areas, name them, and could easily select between them from a menu or something like that. That way the same pre-defined area remains in use until the user wants to create a new one or easily switches to a different one.

I hope this all makes sense. In any case, thanks for reading. =)

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Mario Kemper (Romario)
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Vadim Peretokin (vperetokin) said : 		#1

Yes, I suppose I agree with the request for pre-defined areas. The tougher choice would be integrating into the interface such that it does not get in the way for 95% of the people and isn't too hard to retrieve for 5% of the others.

Maybe this is where the customizable toolbar will come into play. Mario, what are your thoughts on this?

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Best Mario Kemper (Romario) (mario-kemper) said : 		#2

I think there is more than one nice idea in eyerouge's thoughts and due to the fact that Shutter does not use or depend on scrot anymore they are all (at least theoretically) realizable.

Comment on example 1):
Maybe we could use the selection tools to select a group of windows as well, e.g. draw a selection area and all windows within this area will be captured afterwards. We could also try to group the windows in the dropdown box by application and offer functions like "capture all nautilus windows" for example.
Maybe a regex search could be useful as well, so users could use a regular expression to capture all windows that match the search pattern...

Comment on example 3):
Bug LP: #344754 targets the "screenshot redo" request as well and could be a very useful feature. We should add a function that allows the user to redo the the last screenshot. (remember the last selection, window or section without redrawing/reselecting every time)

comment on specifying pixel values of selection area:
I am not really sure how this could be implemented but maybe we can add kind of a toolbar to the advanced selection tool. This toolbar would fade in and out like the firefox toolbar when you run firefox in fullscreen mode. There could be some pixel information or predefined areas of the screen.
At least we could use the arrow keys to resize the selection area pixel by pixel...

The most important thing is to prevent Shutter from getting bloated. A customizable toolbar is definitely needed to keep the interface clean.
Thank you eyerouge for your detailed feedback on Shutter!

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eyerouge (spam-eyerouge) said : 		#3

Thanks Mario Kemper (Romario), that solved my question.