Shutter
This is a very powerful and feature-rich tool for taking screenshots. Written in GTK and blending well in GNOME, Shutter offers just about anything you would ask from such an application: timer, screenshots of whole screen, windows, widgets, a quick and easy-to-use editor for fast retouching or pointing out certain aspects of the image, support for plugins, exporting/importing and saving to PNG, JPG or BMP. Definitely a winner in my opinion.

GNOME Screenshot
This is the default screenshot application that comes with the GNOME desktop environment, offering a very basic graphical interface. It’s triggered by pressing Print Screen, and by default it will take the screenshot of the whole screen. Here’s how it looks:

Although it allows to take screenshots of only windows or section of the screen, unfortunately these are not available in the graphical interface, but can be triggered by running gnome-screenshot in a terminal with certain parameters. For example, gnome-screenshot -w will take the screenshot of a window, gnome-screenshot -a will take the screenshot of a screen area, while gnome-screenshot -B will take the screenshot of a window, excluding window borders. Why these don’t have a corresponding tick box in the graphical window is still a mystery to me. That being said, GNOME Screenshot is a very fast choice if you quickly want to grab the whole screen and dump it to a file.

KSnapshot
This is the screenshot application used by KDE and provides a timer as well as possibility to take the screenshot of a particular area of the screen or only a window, include or exclude window decorations. Pretty fast and easy to use.

ImageMagick
Actually the tool is called import and it’s included in the imagemagick package. It can be used in the command-line mode and comes with various options. It can be a little hard to manipulate it and maybe not the best recommendation for a person who uses only GUI, but otherwise it’s very powerful. The easiest way to take a screenshot using it would probably be something like import image.png, and then select the region of the screen you want to capture.

scrot
Or SCReen SHot, scrot is yet another powerful tool for taking screenshots in command-line mode. The simplest way to use it would be scrot image.png, which will take a screenshot of the whole screen and save it in the current directory as image.png. To set a delay time in seconds, use the -d switch, e.g. scrot -d 3 image.png.

…And one more

GIMP
Probably well-known by most users who use to edit images on a daily basis or even occasionally, GIMP is a very powerful and feature-rich image manipulation application. One of the features it also has is the ability to take screenshots. To use it, go to File->Create->Screenshot… and select the desired options in the window that appears.

For those of you who didn’t hear about it before, it’s probably time you have a look at it. Shutter is probably the most powerful screenshot-taking application available for GNOME, including countless features and several useful tools to take screenshots and manipulate them in any way possible.

The latest release brings several new features, including:

• improved uploading by adding a bunch of new image hosting services
• improved CLI interface

Other changes include rewritten code and fixed bugs.

To install the latest Shutter release in Ubuntu, open a terminal and type in the following two lines:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:shutter/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install shutter

The first command will add the Shutter repository to your sources list and the second will fetch and install the latest version.

Features

Shutter supports sessions, exporting to various Internet services, it can save in various image formats, including PNG or JPG, it supports plugins and comes bundled with a lot of them. In addition, Shutter is also highly configurable via the Edit->Preferences menu entry.

It allows you to take screenshots of the whole desktop, a window, a section of desktop, a child window, a single menu or cascading menus, only a tooltip, and it provides a timer too.

For quick editing, Shutter comes with the Shutter Drawing Tool, an application which can be launched from the menu or from the toolbar, and which includes basic painting tools like straight lines or rectangles, but also text or the pixelize effect. However the current version seems to have a bug when trying to save the image, the window closing unexpectedly. Still, exporting to a huge number of image formats works, as well as PDF or SVG.

Drawing tool

The configuration window allows to change the default image format for saving screenshots (PNG, JPEG or BMP), automatically save file, change the default file name (including the numbering style), include or exclude the cursor, include or exclude window decorations, automatically resize window, generate thumbnail, border, reduce colors, enable/disable popups, change the default keybinding in GNOME, upload images to various services.

You can start Shutter at login, hide the window on first launch and also hide the notification icon. Tray icon integration is also provided. Shutter also comes with several plugins, mostly for applying image effects.

Plugins

Behavior options

In addition to these, Shutter also includes several nice command-line switches which provide the possibility to take screenshots directly from the terminal (for example shutter -w will take the screenshot of a window while shutter -f will capture the fullscreen).