Flameshot is the best! I've been using it for 10+ years. I have it wired up to some hot keys in my window manager, and have it dump to s3 so I can paste around links to screenshots everywhere for work.
Man I hope this delivers. I haven't been able to use Flameshot for over a year since switching to Wayland because weird shit happens with my multi-monitor setup.
I love flameshot, before it I used Shutter and I don't regret switching to Flameshot whatsoever. I use it on my work and personal laptops (Debian+xfce4)
This has the same issue as most screenshot software, it's out of date relative to modern devices. Every Mac laptop for the last ~4 years has an HDR display. Many windows devices are also HDR. But this app doesn't capture HDR.
I tried putting up an HDR image and then capturing the screen. All HDR brightness was gone from the image.
I get it's not easy per-se. It wasn't until MacOS Tahoe that Apple's own screen capture on Mac started supporting HDR. Windows 10/11, AFAIK, only supports HDR through the XBox Game Bar's capture. Apps like ShareX still only capture SDR.
I mostly bring that up because I have apps the draw HDR and spent some time trying to find ways to add tests that we're actually getting HDR on the screen using screen captures. I hit a wall and gave up (2021).
Honest and maybe stupid question. What does enabling HDR on Mac actually does? I have Samsung Odyssey, and turning it on for me only slightly dims the brightness of the display and rather feels uncomfortable to me personally, so I keep it off. What benefits (or drawbacks) should I expect when having it on? I spend most of my time in my terminal, my editor (GUI Emacs) and browser. I rarely have to edit photos or videos, do I still need it, I wonder.
update: turns out, for my specific case of the display model, it seems it's better to keep it off, otherwise the colors are not as vibrant.
Note: Pretty much all phones for the last 4-5 years take HDR images. Take a high contrast phone (sun in the background, something dark covering half the image). Then later, view in in your phone. At least on iPhone they have some "fade to bright" thing where they don't show the HDR instantly but they instead fade to HDR over 1 second or so. Once they the brightness up it will still be up for the next photo. If you get out of the photo app at some point it will reset and then the next time you look at a photos it will do the "fade to HDR" thing.
Note: that site seems to only work correctly in Chrome. In Safari, the images flicker between SDR and HDR in some semi-random way. Firefox, AFAIK, has not added any HDR support yet.
Honestly the best screenshot software I've used so far is KDE's built-in printscreen thingy. I think it's called Spectacle. Does exactly all of the things you want - easy copying of regions, recording videos of regions (Wayland only unfortunately), annotation, etc.
One of the few times in Linux land where the UX is actually significantly better than Windows or Linux, and there's basically no jank at all.
(The only slight jank I noticed is that on X11 the "Screen recording" button just ... doesn't do anything. No "you need Wayland" message. Just nothing. I'll give it a pass though because the rest is so surprisingly great. Good job Spectacle authors!)
I do use ShareX on Windows for video recordings but Spectacle is better.
I love flameshot and use it at work all the time for ridiculously marked-up and snarky screenshots to send co-workers or attach to JIRAs. Part of me wants to believe the "flame" in flameshot is for flaming people, like yes, you see this shit here? How about a nice big arrow so you don't fucking miss it
I used to really like this software, and I still do. But there were a couple of dealbreakers for me.
1) As others mentioned, Wayland support. But it seems that it's gotten a lot better since I last used it. I resisted using Wayland for a long time because of several software breaking, but I've switched over now that most of the things I use now work (or because I've stopped using things that don't work).
2) it was broken for me with fractional scaling. This is the main reason why I switched, I started using fractional scaling on my second monitor and could not properly fix it for the life of me. I haven't tested it recently, but I just checked, and the github issue seems to still be open. https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues/564
anything would be better than win11 snipping tool, it is crazy that after win10 it stopped working across 2 monitors, you can only snip in one of the two monitors
45 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 61.4 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/kingcu/screendrop
On a small note: This recent PR is both awesome and pretty funny to me.
https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/pull/4498#issue-3...
I tried putting up an HDR image and then capturing the screen. All HDR brightness was gone from the image.
I get it's not easy per-se. It wasn't until MacOS Tahoe that Apple's own screen capture on Mac started supporting HDR. Windows 10/11, AFAIK, only supports HDR through the XBox Game Bar's capture. Apps like ShareX still only capture SDR.
I mostly bring that up because I have apps the draw HDR and spent some time trying to find ways to add tests that we're actually getting HDR on the screen using screen captures. I hit a wall and gave up (2021).
Jan 2024: https://www.qt.io/blog/window-embedding-in-qt-quick
Sep 2025: https://forum.qt.io/topic/163224/hdr-example-code
Latest docs (search for "HDR"): https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qvideoframeformat.html
This Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1ibala5/ive_discov...
... shares info about a Swift-based screen recorder that claims to support HDR. (I have no ability to verify that.) That might work for you.
update: turns out, for my specific case of the display model, it seems it's better to keep it off, otherwise the colors are not as vibrant.
https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr-gain-map-gallery/
Note: Pretty much all phones for the last 4-5 years take HDR images. Take a high contrast phone (sun in the background, something dark covering half the image). Then later, view in in your phone. At least on iPhone they have some "fade to bright" thing where they don't show the HDR instantly but they instead fade to HDR over 1 second or so. Once they the brightness up it will still be up for the next photo. If you get out of the photo app at some point it will reset and then the next time you look at a photos it will do the "fade to HDR" thing.
Note: that site seems to only work correctly in Chrome. In Safari, the images flicker between SDR and HDR in some semi-random way. Firefox, AFAIK, has not added any HDR support yet.
There's also this: https://threejs.org/examples/?q=hdr#webgpu_hdr
Should work on Chrome Mac/iOS, and Safari iOS. Broken on Safari MacOS.
just video is waaay better in cleanshot than it is in shareX (and a bit simpler to set up)
One of the few times in Linux land where the UX is actually significantly better than Windows or Linux, and there's basically no jank at all.
(The only slight jank I noticed is that on X11 the "Screen recording" button just ... doesn't do anything. No "you need Wayland" message. Just nothing. I'll give it a pass though because the rest is so surprisingly great. Good job Spectacle authors!)
I do use ShareX on Windows for video recordings but Spectacle is better.
1) As others mentioned, Wayland support. But it seems that it's gotten a lot better since I last used it. I resisted using Wayland for a long time because of several software breaking, but I've switched over now that most of the things I use now work (or because I've stopped using things that don't work).
2) it was broken for me with fractional scaling. This is the main reason why I switched, I started using fractional scaling on my second monitor and could not properly fix it for the life of me. I haven't tested it recently, but I just checked, and the github issue seems to still be open. https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues/564
2022 (114 points, 30 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30071766
2021 (335 points, 84 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113753
But why the hell can’t we get pen smoothing? What if I want to use the pen tool but not make it look like I’m a child on several mediations?
https://apps.kde.org/spectacle/
I found Flameshot to work flawlessly only on Linux X11 and Windows. Other platforms (Wayland, macOS) have problems.