Flameshot

Related articles
Screen capture
Flameshot
is a program for taking screenshots. It has an interactive GUI with controls to select the desired capture region, move and resize the capture window, make edits with common drawing tools (pencil, line, rectangle, circle, blur, undo/redo), and choose the output destination (copy to clipboard, save to disk, upload to
Imgur
, open with another program).
Installation
Install
the
flameshot
package.
Troubleshooting
Sub-commands exit immediately with no output
You can start Flameshot as a background process at any time during your X session:
$ flameshot &
No tray icon
There are probably other ways to do this.  Here is just one way.
Install
gnome-shell-extension-topicons-plus
AUR
Then in the gnome tweaks application (may also need to download if you do not have it installed):
Click on the Extensions tab
Enable "Topicons plus" so it moves the legacy tray icons to the top panel
Done!
Flameshot does not use currently visible windows
You may encounter this issue if you have installed
xf86-video-intel
.
Simply remove the
xf86-video-intel
package and make sure there is no dangling X11 configuration for the package under
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/
.
Then reboot the system.
This was discussed in an issue on the Flameshot Github repository:
https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues/1677
.
Fonts render strangely
QT6 changed the
default DPI scale factor rounding policy
to `Passthrough`.
Set it back to QT5's `Round`:
env QT_SCALE_FACTOR_ROUNDING_POLICY=Round flameshot gui
Flameshot starts with an error on Sway / wlroots
When trying to take a screenshot, Flameshot will display the following error:
flameshot: error: Unable to capture screen
flameshot: error: Unable to capture screen
qt.qpa.wayland: Wayland does not support QWindow::requestActivate()
flameshot: info: Screenshot aborted.
Flameshot requires the following packages to be installed to work correctly on Wayland:
xdg-desktop-portal
xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
grim
Once these are installed, you should be able to start Flameshot.
More information can be found on the
Sway wiki page
Flameshot starts with an error on Gnome Wayland
When trying to take a screenshot the first time, Flameshot will request permissions and the Gnome portal will show a permission prompt. If permissions have been denied once, flameshot will never display the dialog again and display the following error:
flameshot: error: Unable to capture screen
flameshot: error: Unable to capture screen
flameshot: info: Screenshot aborted.
Permissions can be shown by the
flatpak permissions
command (note the
no
here):
$ flatpak permissions
Table      Object     App Permissions Data
screenshot screenshot     no          0x00
To reset the permission and ask again, run the following command (note the single quotes at the end relates to the empty "App" column, it may change if flatpak has a non-empty application ID):
$ flatpak permission-reset ''
Table      Object     App Permissions Data
screenshot screenshot     no          0x00
Flameshot does not work on all monitors of a multi-monitor setup in KDE Plasma on wayland
The flameshot overlay only shows on one of several monitors. A
workaround has been suggested
in the flameshot github repository.
Basically, KDE plasma needs to be configured to overwrite the initial position of the flameshot overlay window in order for the flameshot overlay to show up on all connected monitors. For this, start the "Window Rules" application and create a new window rule with the following settings:
"Window Class": flameshot
"Window Types": normal window
"Window Title": Exact Match: flameshot
"Position": Force 0 0
"Fullscreen": Force No
"Obey geometry restrictions": Force Yes
"Keep above other windows": Force Yes
Flameshot does not work on all monitors of a multi-monitor setup in Sway
The flameshot overlay only shows on one of several monitors. A
workaround has been suggested
in the flameshot github repository.
The workaround consists of forcing the flameshot window/overlay to launch in floating mode and not in full screen, by adding the following line to your Sway configuration:
for_window [app_id="flameshot"] border pixel 0, floating enable, fullscreen disable, move absolute position 0 0
Alternatively, you can force Flameshot to run under xWayland with
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb flameshot gui
but note that, while it fixes the multi-monitor issue, it breaks keyboard shortcuts so Flameshot have to be controlled entirely with the mouse.
Flameshot does not generate thumbnails in KDE Dolphin
When running Plasma 6, trying to save a picture using dolphin's file picker will show the directory with no thumbnails if other image files are present. Running flameshot in a terminal will show the reason.
kf.service.services: KServiceTypeTrader: serviceType "ThumbCreator" not found
Installing
kio-extras
solves this problem.
[1]
Global shortcuts do not work on Gnome Wayland
Create a wrapper script that sets the correct environment variable:
cat > $HOME/flameshot-gui <<EOF
#!/bin/sh
export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland
/usr/bin/flameshot gui
EOF

chmod +x $HOME/flameshot-gui
Open the Settings window, go to "Keyboard" > "View and Customize Shortcuts" > "Custom Shortcuts", and click the "+" button. Select the shortcut you want and enter the path to the wrapper script in the "Command" button.
See also
Official website
Claims that using
dbus-launch
fixes sub-command problems:
xmonad
,
i3