Taking Screenshots with The GIMP

Back in the days when I used Windows, one of the applications that I relied on was Paint Shop Pro. It wasn’t just a powerful image editor. It also had a built-in screen capture function. Professionally, that was very useful.

Of course, Paint Shop Pro isn’t available for Linux. And, anyway, I think Corel (the company that now owns it) has really bloated Paint Shop Pro in an attempt to turn it into a rival to Photoshop.

I regularly use one of a handful of screen capture utilities on the Linux desktop. Every so often, I find myself pulling those images into The GIMP to edit them. But since The GIMP has its own screen capture function, I can cut out the middle man whenever I need to.

To take a screenshot, fire up The GIMP. From the File menu, choose Create and then click Screenshot to open the Screenshot dialog.

You can choose to take a screenshot of:

• A single window
• The entire screen
• A region on the screen or on a window

You can also set a delay (in seconds) before grabbing the screen. When you’re ready, click the Snap button. If you chose to:

• Take a screenshot of a single window, click on that window
• Grab a region of a screen or window, click and drag to select the region

After a moment, the screenshot appears in The GIMP.

From there, you can manipulate the image as you need and then export it to a file. Easy, no?

— Scott Nesbitt