How to do a print screen or capture an area of the screen

Is there an equivalent of the Window’s Print Screen + Paste (or better yet the Mac OS Cmd+Shift+4, Space) in Gnome?

Answers:

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Method 1

Shift+PrtScrn will do the job. A dialog appears on screen allowing you to select any part of it.

Method 2

Gnome should have screenshot abilities built already in.

However, the default trigger is the Print key, which your keyboard may lack. You can remap this shortcut with gnome-keybinding-properties.

Method 3

There are tons. I personally use import, from ImageMagick. It has the ability to capture the whole screen, a given window, or to let you select an area of the screen and just capture that

Specific area

$ import /path/to/output.png

import will let you draw an area with the mouse to capture:

Individual window

First you need to find out the X window ID:

$ xdpyinfo | grep focus
focus:  window 0x3000006, revert to Parent

Then you can run import:

$ import -window 0x3000006 /path/to/output.png

You can also run import /path/to/output.png like when taking a screenshot of a specific area, and when it pauses to let you draw the area with your mouse, click on the target window.

Whole screen

Use root for the window ID:

$ import -window root /path/to/output.png

You can use xbindkeys to bind those commands to the Print Screen key; I use a script called screenshot, so my configuration looks like:

"screenshot root"
m:0x0 + c:107

"screenshot window"
m:0x8 + c:107

Method 4

Just wrote this small interface to xwd, to make it wait the provided number of seconds before it takes the dump. It seems to work.

dumptime () {
  (sleep $1; xwd -root | convert - `date +%I.%M.%S`.png) &
}

Also, there are scrot and gnome-screenshot.

The ImageMagick import solution in Mr. Mrozek’s answer has a famous “black box” bug on -window root – not everyone gets it, but I do.

According to this, gnome-screenshot is based on ImageMagick – but it is not a wrapper; I just browsed the code, and it is a big C application.

Method 5

Hit print screen and if gnome is setup correctly, a screenshot utility will pop up.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0