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GtkGrab - Screenshot Uploader

Version 0.2.0 Created by Evan Coury

Update Notice

If you are updating GtkGrab, please be aware that you may need to update your config.cfg file (see the samples) and/or your handler.php on the server after updating.

Introduction

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.

Usage Instructions

  • 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.

Installation

  • Clone your own copy via Git.
  • Set a username and password in handler.php and upload it to your server.
  • Create a directory called caps on your server in the same directory as handler.php and chmod it to 777.
  • Copy the appropriate config.cfg-sample-{os} to config.cfg. Set the username and password to match handler.php and posturl to be the URL to handler.php.
  • Follow any platform-specific instructions below.

Amazon S3 Upload Support

  • Alternatively, GtkGrab supports using s3cmd (available in ruby-gems) to upload screenshots to Amazon S3.
  • To configure: s3cmd --configure to create a .s3cfg file and place it in the GtkGrab directory. In your GtkGrab config, set postURL to s3.
  • Note: if a local .s3cfg is not available, then the default .s3cfg will be used instead (if it exists).

Fedora Installation

In your terminal, run the following command as root or via sudo:

yum install scrot xclip

In Gnome, set up a keyboard shortcut for GtkGrab/screenshot of your choosing via System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts.

Ubuntu Installation

In your terminal, run the following command:

sudo apt-get install scrot xclip

In Gnome, set up a keyboard shortcut for GtkGrab/screenshot of your choosing via System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts.

Arch Linux Installation

In your terminal, run the following command as root or via sudo:

pacman -S scrot xclip

In Gnome, set up a keyboard shortcut for GtkGrab/screenshot of your choosing via System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts.

Mac Installation

  • Install Growl and growlnotify from http://growl.info/
  • Use automator to run GtkGrab/screenshot via 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.

Windows Installation

Sorry, GtkGrab does not support your operating system. If anyone would like to add Windows support, please fork the project and let me know!

Screenshot Tool

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.

Animated GIF Support

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 ./screenshot gif.

Troubleshooting

  • 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 ./screenshot to 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.

License

GtkGrab is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 3. See COPYING file for details.