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Flameshot

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281 pointsOsrsNeedsf2P113 comments

This has the same issue as most screenshot software, it's out of date relative to modern devices. Every Mac laptop for the last ~4 years has an HDR display. Many windows devices are also HDR. But this app doesn't capture HDR.

I tried putting up an HDR image and then capturing the screen. All HDR brightness was gone from the image.

I get it's not easy per-se. It wasn't until MacOS Tahoe that Apple's own screen capture on Mac started supporting HDR. Windows 10/11, AFAIK, only supports HDR through the XBox Game Bar's capture. Apps like ShareX still only capture SDR.

I mostly bring that up because I have apps the draw HDR and spent some time trying to find ways to add tests that we're actually getting HDR on the screen using screen captures. I hit a wall and gave up (2021).

The readme suggests this is a Linux-first app and as HDR basically doesn’t work at all on Linux(?) I don’t think it’s very surprising that this app doesn’t handle it.

It does a great job for my purposes – describing which buttons to click over email or im.

Haven't used this app for ages, but yesterday I fine-tuned the HDR settings for my newly bought laptop under KDE/plasma, definitely on Linux. That readme might be outdated (or the tool doesn't work on KDE at all)

My understanding of the landscape currently is that KDE Plasma is the only major DE that supports HDR. I use it for Steam for that reason.

Yeah I think I’m a bit outdated here. But I do think Linux hdr support is weak enough that many Linux-oriented apps are unlikely to do it well

HDR videos and games (both native and proton) work in both KDE and Gnome (and supposedly Sway and Hyprland, but I haven't tried either). I think support in KDE/Gnome landed in a stable release ~6 months ago.

The HDR experience on KDE is about as good as the Windows one. Last time I tried Gnome, there was no way to configure SDR and HDR brightness separately, but it was definitely still usable.

The problem was not only in KDE but also in NVIDIA drivers iiuc. For my setting HDR has been stably working on KDE since early 2025.

KDE has its own native screenshot tool called spectacle that I find works as least a well, if not better, than flameshot. (No idea about HDR, though.)

Yeah, it doesn't seem to be the thing for Windows. For example its capture hotkey is PrtScrn which has been the Windows built-in capture key since approximately the Bronze Age, and then there's modifiers for whether you want to capture one window or everything, and if you really want to get fancy the Snipping Tool, all of them already built into the OS.

Honest and maybe stupid question. What does enabling HDR on Mac actually does? I have Samsung Odyssey, and turning it on for me only slightly dims the brightness of the display and rather feels uncomfortable to me personally, so I keep it off. What benefits (or drawbacks) should I expect when having it on? I spend most of my time in my terminal, my editor (GUI Emacs) and browser. I rarely have to edit photos or videos, do I still need it, I wonder.

update: turns out, for my specific case of the display model, it seems it's better to keep it off, otherwise the colors are not as vibrant.

I don't know if these are compelling. On a Mac I think they are somewhat

https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr-gain-map-gallery/

Note: Pretty much all phones for the last 4-5 years take HDR images. Take a high contrast phone (sun in the background, something dark covering half the image). Then later, view in in your phone. At least on iPhone they have some "fade to bright" thing where they don't show the HDR instantly but they instead fade to HDR over 1 second or so. Once they the brightness up it will still be up for the next photo. If you get out of the photo app at some point it will reset and then the next time you look at a photos it will do the "fade to HDR" thing.

Note: that site seems to only work correctly in Chrome. In Safari, the images flicker between SDR and HDR in some semi-random way. Firefox, AFAIK, has not added any HDR support yet.

There's also this: https://threejs.org/examples/?q=hdr#webgpu_hdr

Should work on Chrome Mac/iOS, and Safari iOS. Broken on Safari MacOS.

This has been my experience as well, I've searched high and low for a screenshot software that supports HDR and found none. It's the sole reason I have HDR disabled. At least microsoft updated snipping tool now, but the usability is nothing close compared to Flameshot or Lightshot.

For what it's worth, I notice this week that the built in macOs screenshot tool will capture in HDR.

>But this app doesn't capture HDR.

When you say the Xbox game bar accounts for it, do you mean video or still images? I've had HDR disabled for some time but I remember win+shift+s on Windows 11 capturing over-exposed screenshots when playing videogames.

The Xbox Game Bar video and still images do support HDR. They were the first feature to support HDR on windows. More recently the Snipping Tool on 11 also supports HDR, but only the newer one, not the older snipping tool. If you get images in JXR (jpeg-xr) files then you have HDR, if you get over-exposed pngs/jpgs then it doesnt do HDR.

I did some Googling to discover if Qt supports HDR on MacOS. It looks like support is currently limited, but it is an area of active development.

Jan 2024: https://www.qt.io/blog/window-embedding-in-qt-quick

Sep 2025: https://forum.qt.io/topic/163224/hdr-example-code

Latest docs (search for "HDR"): https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qvideoframeformat.html

This Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1ibala5/ive_discov...

... shares info about a Swift-based screen recorder that claims to support HDR. (I have no ability to verify that.) That might work for you.

What does "HDR" do in a computer screen? We're talking about high dynamic range, right?

Flameshot is the best! I've been using it for 10+ years. I have it wired up to some hot keys in my window manager, and have it dump to s3 so I can paste around links to screenshots everywhere for work.

https://github.com/kingcu/screendrop

> and have it dump to s3 so I can paste around links to screenshots everywhere for work.

I wanted something like this too but I modified Flameshot so I don't need a bash script in-between.

Flameshot already has a feature to upload to Imgur so I modified that and also added some small things (like randomized file names, some new config options).

> Flameshot already has a feature to upload to Imgur

Didn't they remove it though? Because someone complained about "privacy" or something? Devs promised to bring it back as the plugin, but I wasn't following progress on it, I don't know if that happened yet.

> dump to s3 so I can paste around links to screenshots everywhere for work

This has got to be the "todo list app" for people who aren't app devs; mine [0] is for MacOS + launchd + hammerspoon and I use Shottr for annotation

[0] https://github.com/philsnow/shots-filed

It stopped working for me after I switched to Wayland

The above works on wayland, had to make the changes specifically when I moved over to wayland and hyprland

Same for me. I would love to use it on my Sway desktop, but never managed to make it run there.

This works for me on PopOS Cosmic (Wayland). Please lmk if my flags are incorrect.

XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=sway QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb flameshot

yep, I bound it to win+shift+s like the screenshots in windows when I made the flip to full time linux a couple years ago.

Fell in absolute love with the controls though. Way more powerful than windows screenshots.

Great software.

On a small note: This recent PR is both awesome and pretty funny to me.

https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/pull/4498#issue-3...

Ambitious!

> closes #4494 #4493 #4478 #4475 #4465 #4462 #4457 #4449 #4441 #4437 #4435 #4433 #4432 #4430 #4402 #4401 #4260 #4205 #4172 #4171 #4073 #4042 #4035 #3874 #3854 #3847 #3844 #3814 #3811 #3779 #3761 #3689 #3698 #3649 #3616 #3614 #3566 #3528 #3517 #3468 #3461 #3422 #3393 #3392 #3378 #3349 #3345 #3339 #3243 #3164 #3146 #3126 #3096 #3047 #3068 #3056 #3037 #3027 #3020 #2970 #2849 #2459 #2364 #2328 #2327 #2303 #2264 #2156 #1938 #1901 #1566 #1530 #1408 #1382 #1335 #1278 #1163 #1134 #748 #724 #590 #564 #265 #227 #119 #108 #72 #53 #7

Oh, thanks for the link. I've been using flameshot for most of the past decade, but haven't been able to use it with pop-os and my monitors recently because it was derotating my monitor.

Man I hope this delivers. I haven't been able to use Flameshot for over a year since switching to Wayland because weird shit happens with my multi-monitor setup.

yeah i tried it the other day because spectacle feels lacking and it completely failed on my multimonitor kde wayland setup.

I will say that over time I've adjusted to Spectacle. Having it pinned to the taskbar is a good approximation of having Flameshot in the tray. Also a nice thing about Spectacle is that the window persists after you take a screenshot so you can then initiate, for example, 'New rectangular region' and it will launch you back into sceenshot mode with a rectangle of the same dimensions as the one you just took -- making it well suited for iterating with an AI coding assistant where I give it a screenshot with examples of a bug, then re-send it another screenshot showing what still needs work.

I used to really like this software, and I still do. But there were a couple of dealbreakers for me.

1) As others mentioned, Wayland support. But it seems that it's gotten a lot better since I last used it. I resisted using Wayland for a long time because of several software breaking, but I've switched over now that most of the things I use now work (or because I've stopped using things that don't work).

2) it was broken for me with fractional scaling. This is the main reason why I switched, I started using fractional scaling on my second monitor and could not properly fix it for the life of me. I haven't tested it recently, but I just checked, and the github issue seems to still be open. https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues/564

I wish ShareX was available on Linux https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX

Good news is there are ongoing efforts to make that happen; https://github.com/SnapXL/SnapX

ShareX (win) > CleanShot (mac, paid) > Fireshot

just video is waaay better in cleanshot than it is in shareX (and a bit simpler to set up)

I agree. ShareX for Windows is flawless in my opinion.

it by default uploads screenshots to public imgur, which was surprising and a no go for corporate setting, you can change that in setting, but it is still wants too do too many things

I'm vaguely involved w/ ShareX, so take this however you want.

It doesn't as of a recent update (due to continued stability issues at Imgur). The default behavior is to not upload anymore.

Additionally ShareX pops up a big red warning telling you that you're about to upload. There are some forks (see: ShareNot) that explicitly remove any uploading, but by default there is a registry key, a setting, and a big warning that you can enable that disables uploading.

I always used my own FTP provider with my own URL. So they always looked like share.example.com/15udn18.jpg

Embeddable as well. Anyone with a website should use this method so they can maximize the use of their hosting.

Love flameshot. Did my due diligence for screenshot tools, found it, and never tried anything else again :)

Same. I tried probably 6-7 different tools on Ubuntu before I found Flameshot. It was everything I was looking for.

Good to know.

It was number three for me, I stopped looking and sort of wondered if there was anything else out there better.

Flameshot is great! It was one of the reasons I have not switched to Wayland. Although it seems now they have wayland support in beta.

I have worked with Wayland + Flameshot for the past 2-3 years and it seems to work fine as far as I can tell.

I'm guessing you don't have multiple monitors :)

The good news is a few lines of shell scripting, grim, slurp and satty can be combined to create a decent alternative.

Hit a hotkey, capture a region, get presented with a way to annotate it and easily copy it to your clipboard or write it to disk. I use it on a multi-monitor system and it works no problem with Wayland.

Here's an example from my dotfiles: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/blob/master/.local/bin/do...

It supports capturing a region, a specific window or the focused monitor.

Flameshot with sway has been a nightmare for me. I have tried a couple of times but i have never gotten it to work. I have settled with grimshot. The biggest missed feature is the number annotator. It was so easy with flameshot to annotate a screenshot with 1-9 and then refer to each number in a document. I really miss flameshot:(

The solution I posted includes an incrementing number annotator btw. Satty has a lot of great features. You can even capture the whole screen so that you can crop it after you've done your annotation which is similar to how Flameshot works.

Thank you so much. This has been such a pain for me when I write documentation.

Try: XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=sway QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb flameshot

Thank you. I tried that. Having the interface run under Xwayland caused a ton of problems with my monitors. I also don't use a lot of QT apps so not being able to paste was a problem.

I think it's beta for a reason. I just tried the appimage for their latest release and it's behaving in the same broken way that I remember.

I have a multi-monitor setup with different size & resolution screens, so that may be a factor for the problems I'm having. Really hope it'll work someday.

i've been using flameshot with wayland the last six months, simply because i didn't know i couldn't

Spectacle for KDE is also a good choice.

https://apps.kde.org/spectacle/

I found Flameshot to work flawlessly only on Linux X11 and Windows. Other platforms (Wayland, macOS) have problems.

Hopefully wayland support will improve

Maybe try Spectacle. I use the OOTB Spectacle app on Fedora KDE. It has the same features as Flameshot and is .. well, native.

But on my Mac, I use indeed Flameshot, it's not ideal (the window is "shrinking" when a screenshot is captured), but it's better than any alternative I tried.

Why would you use anything but Shottr on macOS?

I'm not affiliated, but the software is simply on a whole different level. They deserve all the fame.

Because it's a black box you have to pay for. No source code available? Gitafuckouttahere.

> Because it's a black box [...]. No source code available?

You know Shottr is only available for macOS, don't you? If source code is so important, why do you even bother using macOS?

I wouldn't install Shottr on any of my Linux machines, even if available. Despite it being objectively better than any available alternative. I'd recreate one myself if necessary.

But on a corporate Mac, where 99.999% of executed code is a black box, why bother?

Huh? I'm running kde plasma on wayland and flameshot runs like a dream come true. I hit the flameshot icon in the tray, it automatically selects the whole screen to save, or if I click it starts cropping wherever I move the mouse. It's like the devs read my mind for exactly what I wanted

I'm running the same, but for me it's definitely not a smooth experience compared to plasma + X. Indeed I resorted to clicking on tray icon because invocation from custom shortcut doesn't allow me to Ctrl-c (copy to clipboard). On the other hand, clicking from tray breaks Ctrl-s (save to file). Oh, well.

Every Wayland compositor has a different feature set, and KDE is one of the more open to implementing features. It's likely that other people have compositors that stubbornly refuse to implement screenshots for security reasons.

I see. Thank you for the explanation

Honestly the best screenshot software I've used so far is KDE's built-in printscreen thingy. I think it's called Spectacle. Does exactly all of the things you want - easy copying of regions, recording videos of regions (Wayland only unfortunately), annotation, etc.

One of the few times in Linux land where the UX is actually significantly better than Windows or Linux, and there's basically no jank at all.

(The only slight jank I noticed is that on X11 the "Screen recording" button just ... doesn't do anything. No "you need Wayland" message. Just nothing. I'll give it a pass though because the rest is so surprisingly great. Good job Spectacle authors!)

I do use ShareX on Windows for video recordings but Spectacle is better.

Spectacle is great. I tried to switch to it from Flameshot a few months back since it has all the features that I use regularly in Flameshot but ran into an issue where it would 2-3 times longer than Flameshot to start up when starting it up through the CLI. I use keymapper to map all my keyboard shortcuts and starting Spectacle using Qdbus is very slow compares to flameshot, like 1-2 seconds of waiting after pressing the hotkey compared to Flameshot being instant.

Looks like someone found a workaround by having spectacle run as a systemd process and restart after closing though, I'll have to give it a try: https://discuss.kde.org/t/make-spectacle-launch-faster/38030...

This is my go-to screenshot tool for Ubuntu. I've even gone as far as replacing the default printscreen with this using Custom Shortcuts. Word of warning, however: it is somehwat buggy when trying to add more than 1 text boxes on the screenshot.

I love flameshot and use it at work all the time for ridiculously marked-up and snarky screenshots to send co-workers or attach to JIRAs. Part of me wants to believe the "flame" in flameshot is for flaming people, like yes, you see this shit here? How about a nice big arrow so you don't fucking miss it

increase the border size. more. yes. in the bloodiest red. yes. its rectangle time

I love flameshot, before it I used Shutter and I don't regret switching to Flameshot whatsoever. I use it on my work and personal laptops (Debian+xfce4)

Shutter is great in terms of features. I just recently discovered it.

But its code... Thousands (like definitely over 10k) of lines of procedural perl. I had a feature in mind I wanted to contribute and I couldn't even scratch the surface. I doubt this software can evolve any further.

woah, had no idea Shutter was written in Perl

Flameshot is the best. I don't know about HD, and maybe if I get a HD screen I'll find out, but right now it's the slickest

Popular in:

2022 (114 points, 30 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30071766

2021 (335 points, 84 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113753

As a long time (accidental) Flameshot user on Debian Linux, I was surprised to just now learn that Flameshot is written using the cross-platform C++ GUI library Qt. I guess that explains how it works on Microsoft Windows, Linux (X11/Wayland), and MacOS!

This has been a savor for me! I'm tired of screenshot tools that don't let you precisely crop the shot and require you to use editing software. Flameshot with its magnifier is next level.

OS-native functionality covers this?

On Macs = cmd + shift + 4

On Windows = win + shift + s

On Gnome/KDE = shift + printscreen

They don't let you precisely select the area of the screen you want a snapshot of!

It’s VERY GOOD…

But why the hell can’t we get pen smoothing? What if I want to use the pen tool but not make it look like I’m a child on several mediations?

I use it daily. Great little app for taking screenshots on mac, since the macapp is terrible, and the keyboard binding is even worse.

Flameshot is great! I also use it to capture different language text in images that gets piped into tesseract for offline OCR.

This is one of the must have apps on my mac. Combined with hammerspoon or even Raycast, you can do quite a bit of things.

Love Flameshot! Been using it for years since its cross platform so it works on macOS at home and Windows at work.

Flameshot isn't great on macOS, does anyone know of a good open source alternative they would recommend?

Hard to say without knowing what your needs are. What’s wrong with using macOS’ native tools? They work great not only for capturing but for annotation. What exactly are you looking for?

The app has a constant item on the bar at the bottom. Quitting that quits the whole application, I couldn't find a setting to change this behaviour. But I could live with that if it wasn't for it somehow switching desktops when you start taking a screenshot. It switches desktop, goes back to the main one, then starts the set up. Of course that also means it takes a couple of seconds before the screenshot gets taken.

Funny, I found flameshot years ago looking for a Linux to Skitch. What’s lacking in the built-in tool?

I'm unsure what Flameshot on macOS has to do with Flameshot Linux? I used to use Flameshot on Linux, and it works great, though I've always found the built-in screenshot software for Linux good enough. The application doesn't work as smoothly on macOS and I wouldn't need a tool for screenshots if the built-in tooling was any good. It's like it was designed by someone who had created a screenshot for the first time in their life.

what do you use Flameshot for on macOS? if you want to edit stuff, you can set the screenshot tool to open the screenshot in Preview.app where you can perform basic editing on it (cmd+shift+5 and then click Options and choose "Preview" in "Save to")

The built-in screenshot tool is the thing I'm trying to replace. Editing is less of an issue. I rarely need to edit.

> Flameshot isn't great on macOS

What do you mean? For what it does, it absolutely works nicely on mac.

On my Mac all I see is a gray screen when I'm using the app. It used to work on my Mac until a year ago.

Use Flameshot with powertoys on windows 11, powertoys can remap shortcut: win+shift+f23 to PrintScreen.

ksnip is pretty damn good too.

Was looking to see if anyone had mentioned ksnip. Agreed, it’s great.

Flameshot is fantastic software. Works great on Linux and gets the job done.

I forget why but I ended up going back to Lightshot after trying this

Localising this in KDE + HDR in terms of clang improvements.

anything would be better than win11 snipping tool, it is crazy that after win10 it stopped working across 2 monitors, you can only snip in one of the two monitors

Flameshot is excellent! I’ve been happily using it for years.

How do you resize a rectangle made with the rectangle tool?

Flameshot like Lightshot the one on chrome?

Lightshot, if youre using it you should remove it and then google why.

If you have something to say, say it. People don’t have the time to go investigate, but maybe you have something interesting to claim with a source.

For all I know you found a way to tie some software to a politician you want me to hate, or the guy that wrote it donated to $50 to a cause you don’t like, or they murdered beagle puppies in some horrendous way. Just spit it out.

Yeah. This is like clickbait titles. They hate something something for something something reason and won't tell cos it's probably something small.

They leave the comment making it look like the person made something huge. Only to find out that they didn't use the coaster while drinking his chilled beer.

And I don't care about this instance, I am not going to look it up. I have far more negative vibes about the OP in question than Lightshot.

Very bad dark pattern I've been seeing more and more these days.

Lightshot is a cloud-first screenshot tool. This means you shouldn't screenshot sensitive information. That's all I could find.

Considering that there are many tools like ShareX where uploading the screenshot is a feature, I don't really see reboot81's poor attempt at "spreading awareness" as genuine.

I love this app, use it all the time.

Flameshot is my go to on macOS.

Looks great!

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