Getting Screenshots
August 13, 2009 by Clair Ching
Filed under applications
There are different ways to get screenshots. Personally I use at least three methods, depending on what I need to capture. It matters if what I need to take a screenshot of is a website, the entire screen, just one of the applications I am using, etc.
Using GIMP
GIMP has a function to get screenshots. It is awesome because you can set the delay of the screenshot. I use that when I am taking screenshots of a particular application. You could get screenshots by going to the “File” menu of GIMP. Select the item “Create” and then look for “Screenshot” because that is what you want to create. After that a dialog box will appear asking you for your options. You could select a region, an entire window, or the entire screen. The delay for the screenshot could also be set.
GIMP is great because you could get all sorts of screenshots using it. You don’t even have to crop a region because it could be selected in the first place. Same thing goes for those who only want to get screenshots of a particular application running on the desktop.
Firefox’s Screengrab plugin
This is one of the most useful things I’ve ever encountered. It lets you get screenshots of entire webpages or just a specific region. This is a very convenient tool for everyone who needs to put screenshots of web-based applications on their blogs or documentation. Who says you have to get several screenshots before you get the screenshot with the whole length of the page? This is really an awesome plugin.
Use Aviary
Aviary is a web-based application akin to GIMP because it allows you to manipulate images. One of the great things about it is that it’s as if you have GIMP on your browser. That’s why even if you don’t have GIMP installed you can still take a screenshot of the web-based application. And it’s as easy as appending “aviary.com” (without the quotation marks) before the URL of the site you want to take a screenshot of. I just learned about this today. And it looks very nifty too. For more details, you could view this article on how to capture screenshots without any software.
What are your tools and techniques to get screenshots that you need? Could you share them here too? 
Another great tool for creating screen shots is Shutter. It has a lot of built-in plug-ins for creating watermarks, drop shadows, etc. Gimp is too beefy for a netbook (the toolbars get in the way). Shutter is perfect for small screens. It can create full length screen shots of websites too.
I use the display utility in the ImageMagick package. When you click on File-New, you see a button labeled “Grab.” That allows you to capture all or part of the screen, after any delay you care to enter. And it saves the output as jpeg, png, gif, tiff, bmp, etc., whatever you want. And you can resize, rotate, crop, mangle, any of that. Not as useful as the GIMP, but it doesn’t have the overhead either.
Of course, if you do a full screen capture it also captures the display controls, but that’s why we have multiple desktops.