Flameshot – Superb Screenshot Tool | Hacker News Reader

Flameshot – Superb Screenshot Tool

github.com

335 pointsavhception83 comments

This looks really neat, it's amazing what an animated gif or video can do for a README to help to understand what a thing is meant to do.

If I were more of a hacker and hadn't already paid the best 25 bucks I've ever spent on CleanShot X [0] I'd be all over this.

[0]: https://cleanshot.com/

All over what animated gif? But with which software?

not OP but I think they meant all over this tool (Flameshot).

Like OP, I’m also a HUGE fan of cleanshot x for mac. Got our entire team on it, some were quite happy with the built-in screen grabbing tool on Mac, but pretty much all love Cleanshot.

I was referring to the gif on the GitHub README here: https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/#preview (sorry if I was vague)

In this project's case, it showcases a lot of features as they're actually used, rather than some bullets that say what it _should_ do. In general, I appreciate a gif like this for explaining because it boils down some essential features into one easily digestable clip. It's a preferable medium for me over a long YouTube video or text explaining how something works.

And you weren't using MacOS that is, right?

Haha an important detail! Looks like they're trying to make an easily installable version for Mac. I see commits in the log about MacOS as well as a note that mentions building it yourself:

> There are no macOS port of flameshot now that can be easy installed. But you can build flameshot by yourself and use it.

just confirming that i just built from source following the readme instructions (needed some help with qt https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues/586) and it works fine.

however the text size is too small and thats a dealbreaker: https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues/645 hoping this gets resolved.

Thanks for the info.

Cleanshot lools great. Baffles me though that Windows comes with great screenshot tool and MacOS doesn't.

The screenshot tool in macOS can take full screen, region or window screenshots. It can also capture video.

This is all I need from the screenshot tool itself and I am glad that they don’t add a bunch of additional options and stuff inside of screenshot taking itself.

If you want to annotate the screenshot open it in Preview and edit it there.

If you need really powerful editing tools, a third-party tool is appropriate.

It’s better that way to me. Have a system that works nicely for everyone, and leave it to third-party developers to build niche tools.

Imagine how much useless to me stuff there would be on my screen, if the operating system had to ship with tools that did absolutely everything for absolutely everyone.

You can absolutely annotate screenshots using just the integrated screenshot tool of macOS. You can even do the annotation on your iOS device seamlessly, which is really neat if you've got an iPad with Pencil. I don't think there are any third party tools as powerful as that - I loved Flameshot on Linux but I don't see why I would need it on macOS.

You mean the one that's so laggy, there's often a 2 second delay between pressing the hotkey and the screenshot happening? And if you're low on RAM, it'll freeze the whole computer for 15 seconds and not even take the screenshot (potentially crashing Chrome in the process)? Yeah, I love that one! It also seems to hijack the Print Screen key, making it subject to its own instability.

Most of the time I try to not talk about things I don’t have any knowledge of. macOS had a great screenshot feature built in.

On windows shareX is king. I'd say a good bit better even (miss it on my linux machine where I use flameshot)

https://getsharex.com/

A few things it does:

https://i.imgur.com/FMMrVml.png

- uploads text from your clipboard to pastebins and images to your image hoster

- ftp upload (copying the http path to what you uploaded, full control over file naming ect). I built something to upload markdown via ftp and copy a url with the filename as an argument to the clipboard. That url leads to a js renderer for markdown.

- doing mp4 videos

Only downsides: a bit complex in the settings, wants to update often.

- numbering tool to quickly ad step 1, 2,3 to screenshots.

I also use and love sharex. I have it set up to use a digitalocean space (s3 compatible bucket) as its upload target.

I was using Greenshot because of the default configuration. But left for ShareX because of the Mp4 videos and Gifs. You're correct about the settings. But that's what I love about it too. I was able to mimic GS's default behavior in ShareX.

ShareX is extremely bloated, complicated and slow. I used it for a few years, because it was marginally better than SnagIt.

It also lets you do really interesting things like set up a time lapse so that it'll take screenshots every interval and be able to make animated GIF files.

My personal experience is that I never used 10% of the features ShareX had, or so rarely It never made sense.

By my count, mp4 video and FTP are the only things you mentioned that Flameshot doesn't do.

I don't know how common my case is, but my video capture needs quickly rise to needing OBS or equivalent. I don't think a "desktop utility" meets the need. For casual image captures, Flameshot more than satisfies.

Last time I had to use FTP, it was because a client faced ridiculous security policies on incoming email and web, but was for some reason allowed to host FTP service.

What I notice:

- blur for privacy: bad default in flameshot, I usually blur twice with it. If you are not careful text on the edge of your blur at least will remain very readable.

- I still like putting mouse pointer image and number markers quickly

- all the text upload stuff

- I like annotating first, and only than picking the area to shoot.

- highlighting does not multiply colors making highlighted passages less readable (looks foggy).

I've used ShareX for years, really powerful and also a config hell bloated mess. Settings I know are in there, I'll got hunting for 15 minutes to find where they are buried.

It's classic case if feature creep and UI designed by engineers.

But I've not found an alternative so far for Windows

Great tool! But be careful though. In the default config there is a button next to the save local button which uploads your image as a public image to imgur without asking for confirmation.

Fortunately you can remove the button via the settings menu though I do think it is a rather dangerous button to have there by default.

Thanks for the notice, I was taken away by how great the tool was working and making my workflow far easier when helping people with various kinds of IT problems. Uploading a screenshot of something that might contain sensitive information is not something I want to have happen by accident!

I personally have bound my print screen button to “flameshot gui” - it presents an excellent dialog window of what you actually want to do with the screenshot, and offers to annotate it etc.

90% of the time copying it to the clipboard is good enough, but sometimes the option to upload as a public image is nice.

I believe anon uploads to imgur must be accessed by direct url and are not searchable/findable by accident?

Since ctrl+c also works for copying you can just use that and avoid potentially misclicking on the imgur button.

Flameshot is really good (I use it myself on Linux) but there are a couple features I miss from other tools. This probably suggests that I request these on their github :-)

- there doesn't seem to be an option that asks me to prompt for a file name and location if I want to save the screenshot at the time I have taken it. It will use a preselected location and an auto-generated name instead (and/or save to clipboard).

- if I want to annotate the image, it is done on the area of the screen the image was originally captured in. The method I prefer and used in other programs is to put the capture into a new window that you can move around and then edit within.

Agreed - absolutely love this tool and use it with my PrintScreen button on Linux.

Looks great!

I'm on Windows and I use https://getsharex.com/ which is open source too but only for Windows https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX

Will check Flameshot, if is good enough to match my experience with ShareX I will consider make the switch.

I prefer use tools that are available on Linux to increase the visibility of Linux! I believe that if we make more popular (by using and recommending) tools that are available in Windows/Mac _and_ Linux, more people will have no issues to switch to Linux (eg: VLC, Inkscape, Gimp, Krita, LibreOffice, Kdenlive).

I have Ubuntu as a secondary OS because sadly I'm hostage of Adobe CS :(

Will spread the word!

Now looking for the Windows installer on the download page https://flameshot.org/download/ to install it on my PC, I see that is not very handy, the download page links to the latest release page on GitHub who don't have the Windows installer yet https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/releases/tag/v0.8...

The previous version have it! https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/releases/tag/v0.8...

I think that an UX improvement for most users of the download page will be have the direct link to download the latest installer (.msi) instead of link to the latest release page on GitHub with all the binaries, witch can be confusing (besides that now is not even in the latest release). And put the link of latest release page on GitHub as a secondary link.

I've sampled many screenshot tools over the years and it seems like everyone has their opinions. This looks like an improved version of Lightshot which is one of my favorites, but had a few limitations.

My current (windows only) favorite is Screenshot Captor [1] which definitely has a power user bent, but I really like the ability to always both copy the screenshot to clipboard as well as save the screenshot for later use. There's a lot of power built into the annotation/editing tools and a million and one ways to configure/custom process stuff afterwards.

[1]https://www.donationcoder.com/software/mouser/popular-apps/s...

I've been blown away by this awesome screenshot-tool and couldn't help but share it here.

I wish there were one of these tools for linux that had nicer effects, like Skitch or Cleanshot. The annotations like arrows and text need a high-contrast border and drop shadow to make them more visible.

I used Flameshot for awhile but its annotations are flat, and Spectacle + Krita was nice but too heavy to just quickly annotate an image. I'm using KSnip now, which applies a shadow to the annotations, but there's no way to configure a nice border.

Also check out Ksnip: https://github.com/ksnip/ksnip

This has been one of the first utilities I install on new Ubuntu machines for some time. Really recommended and a huge improvement on the default!

Yep, it combines the convenience of a GUI, the scripting capabilities and the power of the key shortcuts. It's almost perfect!

Oh nice! I was migrating my dev environment from an ancient MBP to a Linux machine a few months ago and found Flameshot when looking for a Skitch replacement. Have been a happy user since, it functionally does all the things I need it to do :)

Skitch was so good until Evernote bought abs destroyed it. Such a shame.

I tried to use this but half of the commandline stuff doesn't work, there is no warning or error messages, screenshots don't get saved anywhere. Back to trusty old scrot I guess.

Try KSnip, I really recommend it since Shutter and Flames not have been buggy for me in the past.

Thanks, ill try it

I’ve mapped it to my PrintScreen button on my desktop, but on my laptop it is sadly unusable because Flameshot does not support fractional scaling. There’s an open issue in GitHub https://github.com/lupoDharkael/flameshot/issues/564 with many folks hitting this but it doesn’t look like the project is maintained

The dev of Flameshot burned out a bit, BUT the development was picked up by new maintainers, one of which is NameCheap dev. Project was moved under new organization and the "power" was diversified in multiple parties.

It was a whole process, you can read about it here https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues/789

The last time I tried flameshot, it didn't have any cloud upload options other than imgur. I'd like for s3 compatible uploads (or at the very least dropbox), so I ended up switching to https://screencloud.net/ - no annotation and lighter features, but I can still upload to the cloud of my choice.

After I knew Shutter was going to be deprecated I found Flameshot and I'm not changing it. Really good tool

Only thing I dislike from Flameshot is the "forced" compression of the screenshots. I only found out recently due to a need to have a non compressed screenshot, that in Ubuntu, Shift+Print seems to do the trick (uncompressed area screenshot).

Maybe open an issue on GitHub? https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues/

Its really cool! I might use it as a backup for when I need to do annotated screenshots. Otherwise, it's just so quick to have the gnome extension "screenshot tool" automatically put my selection in the clipboard

I use xnipapp.com right now and this looks even better in terms of editing tools, except for one thing: scrolling capture. It allows me to capture scrolling portions of the screen and it's just so damn useful!

Flameshot is amazing. Really hoping it fully supports MacOS with a simple brew install at some point. Such a great tool compared to Mac's built in screenshot/markup utilities

From github:

"There are no macOS port of flameshot now that can be easy installed. But you can build flameshot by yourself and use it. Please participate in the development of flameshot and help us make a macOS version."

FWIW, a good built-in workflow is the Screenshot app (for image or video capture) + Preview (click the "Markup" button in Preview to see the annotation tools).

The built-in keyboard shortcuts cover my use-cases:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201361

"> flameshot gui" is awesome, one of the most useful tools I use and a terrific replacement for shutter||xclip. I recommend "> peek" to capture gifs.

Flameshot is awesome, and in my list of daily used tools. I especially like the color picker and annotation tools, which I abuse far too often.

Its in my list of awesome gplv3 tools.

I've been using flameshot for years. It's actually part of a scripted workflow for me to transfer notes to my tablet from my desktop.

Great piece of software.

I do love flameshot. I am still searching for a good Gif recorder for Linux which works with i3. On OSX a good gif recorder was licecap

peek (https://github.com/phw/peek) is decent, only issue is that setting the size of the capture area is a bit fiddly

I use https://github.com/phw/peek on i3wm on Manjaro without any problems. For full screen recording, OBS feels the like the best option.

I did a run of all “packages in main repo” screenshot tools for ArchLinux.

Flameshot has an easy UX, and does everything that other tools do, plus a bit more.

I started using Flameshot several months ago. I did not know I needed a deluxe screenshot utility. I definitely needed one.

I just came here to say ... monosnap.

https://monosnap.com

no GNU/linux support, behind a signup wall

Native app and cross platform, great work!

It's using QT5 so not "native" on GTK-based DEs. I think by native, you meant it is not some Electron monstrosity which is great :)

I use Flameshot on Linux and Lightshot on Windows. both have similar UIs and experiences.

I loved Flameshot! Though as far as I'm aware it still doesn't work with Wayland.

"What else could we want in a screensh... oh, my, god"

That perfectly describes my sentiment, too. I did not know I needed this until I had it.

do they know windows bins are missing from the newest release?

wait, there's a windows version?

look at older releases. as mentioned the newest is missing for some reason.

https://i.imgur.com/JpP1UNg.png

I'm using it on linux many years. Good tool.

is there a way to disable uploading to imgur? i wouldn't want to accidentally do it!

Probably not unless the reply to this issue from 2018 https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues/381 is hinting about a rc file instead of recompiling with the button disabled in qmake.

Edit: I went on reading the code. The image uploader is hardcoded into https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/blob/97c195452293... and I didn't find anything to conditionally remove it from the UI. But I won't bet a coffee on it after only a 10 minute cursory scan of the code.

I just had to execute 'flameshot config' and to disable the Image Uploader button.

Use this config option: https://ibb.co/XS6TsXS

In the config, there is a checkbox for the image uploader https://i.imgur.com/pTiY2ul.png

last time i tried it it had no Wayland support. did that change?

It works on GNOME and KDE on Wayland now AFAIK. Still no bueno on sway or other Wayland envs.

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