[HN Gopher] Flameshot
___________________________________________________________________
Flameshot
Author : OsrsNeedsf2P
Score : 270 points
Date : 2026-01-29 19:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| cullenking wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://github.com/kingcu/screendrop
| philsnow wrote:
| > dump to s3 so I can paste around links to screenshots
| everywhere for work
|
| This has got to be the "todo list app" for people who aren't
| app devs; mine [0] is for MacOS + launchd + hammerspoon and I
| use Shottr for annotation
|
| [0] https://github.com/philsnow/shots-filed
| cheschire wrote:
| yep, I bound it to win+shift+s like the screenshots in windows
| when I made the flip to full time linux a couple years ago.
|
| Fell in absolute love with the controls though. Way more
| powerful than windows screenshots.
| KomoD wrote:
| > and have it dump to s3 so I can paste around links to
| screenshots everywhere for work.
|
| I wanted something like this too but I modified Flameshot so I
| don't need a bash script in-between.
|
| Flameshot already has a feature to upload to Imgur so I
| modified that and also added some small things (like randomized
| file names, some new config options).
| iLemming wrote:
| > Flameshot already has a feature to upload to Imgur
|
| Didn't they remove it though? Because someone complained
| about "privacy" or something? Devs promised to bring it back
| as the plugin, but I wasn't following progress on it, I don't
| know if that happened yet.
| dheera wrote:
| It stopped working for me after I switched to Wayland
| smartmic wrote:
| Same for me. I would love to use it on my Sway desktop, but
| never managed to make it run there.
| mog_dev wrote:
| Hopefully wayland support will improve
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| Maybe try Spectacle. I use the OOTB Spectacle app on Fedora
| KDE. It has the same features as Flameshot and is .. well,
| native.
|
| But on my Mac, I use indeed Flameshot, it's not ideal (the
| window is "shrinking" when a screenshot is captured), but it's
| better than any alternative I tried.
| koiueo wrote:
| Why would you use anything but Shottr on macOS?
|
| I'm not affiliated, but the software is simply on a whole
| different level. They deserve all the fame.
| imcritic wrote:
| Because it's a black box you have to pay for. No source
| code available? Gitafuckouttahere.
| koiueo wrote:
| > Because it's a black box [...]. No source code
| available?
|
| You know Shottr is only available for macOS, don't you?
| If source code is so important, why do you even bother
| using macOS?
|
| I wouldn't install Shottr on any of my Linux machines,
| even if available. Despite it being objectively better
| than any available alternative. I'd recreate one myself
| if necessary.
|
| But on a corporate Mac, where 99.999% of executed code is
| a black box, why bother?
| shoobiedoo wrote:
| Huh? I'm running kde plasma on wayland and flameshot runs like
| a dream come true. I hit the flameshot icon in the tray, it
| automatically selects the whole screen to save, or if I click
| it starts cropping wherever I move the mouse. It's like the
| devs read my mind for exactly what I wanted
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Every Wayland compositor has a different feature set, and KDE
| is one of the more open to implementing features. It's likely
| that other people have compositors that stubbornly refuse to
| implement screenshots for security reasons.
| shoobiedoo wrote:
| I see. Thank you for the explanation
| fenazego wrote:
| I'm running the same, but for me it's definitely not a smooth
| experience compared to plasma + X. Indeed I resorted to
| clicking on tray icon because invocation from custom shortcut
| doesn't allow me to Ctrl-c (copy to clipboard). On the other
| hand, clicking from tray breaks Ctrl-s (save to file). Oh,
| well.
| vitaminCPP wrote:
| Great software.
|
| 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...
| aendruk wrote:
| Ambitious!
|
| > closes #4494 #4493 #4478 #4475 #4465 #4462 #4457 #4449 #4441
| #4437 #4435 #4433 #4432 #4430 #4402 #4401 #4260 #4205 #4172
| #4171 #4073 #4042 #4035 #3874 #3854 #3847 #3844 #3814 #3811
| #3779 #3761 #3689 #3698 #3649 #3616 #3614 #3566 #3528 #3517
| #3468 #3461 #3422 #3393 #3392 #3378 #3349 #3345 #3339 #3243
| #3164 #3146 #3126 #3096 #3047 #3068 #3056 #3037 #3027 #3020
| #2970 #2849 #2459 #2364 #2328 #2327 #2303 #2264 #2156 #1938
| #1901 #1566 #1530 #1408 #1382 #1335 #1278 #1163 #1134 #748 #724
| #590 #564 #265 #227 #119 #108 #72 #53 #7
| simtel20 wrote:
| Oh, thanks for the link. I've been using flameshot for most of
| the past decade, but haven't been able to use it with pop-os
| and my monitors recently because it was derotating my monitor.
| oldandboring wrote:
| 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.
| weaksauce wrote:
| yeah i tried it the other day because spectacle feels lacking
| and it completely failed on my multimonitor kde wayland
| setup.
| vzaliva wrote:
| Flameshot is great! It was one of the reasons I have not switched
| to Wayland. Although it seems now they have wayland support in
| beta.
| ktm5j wrote:
| I think it's beta for a reason. I just tried the appimage for
| their latest release and it's behaving in the same broken way
| that I remember.
|
| I have a multi-monitor setup with different size & resolution
| screens, so that may be a factor for the problems I'm having.
| Really hope it'll work someday.
| nickjj wrote:
| The good news is a few lines of shell scripting, grim, slurp
| and satty can be combined to create a decent alternative.
|
| Hit a hotkey, capture a region, get presented with a way to
| annotate it and easily copy it to your clipboard or write it to
| disk. I use it on a multi-monitor system and it works no
| problem with Wayland.
|
| Here's an example from my dotfiles:
| https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/blob/master/.local/bin/do...
|
| It supports capturing a region, a specific window or the
| focused monitor.
| dfc wrote:
| Flameshot with sway has been a nightmare for me. I have tried
| a couple of times but i have never gotten it to work. I have
| settled with grimshot. The biggest missed feature is the
| number annotator. It was so easy with flameshot to annotate a
| screenshot with 1-9 and then refer to each number in a
| document. I really miss flameshot:(
| nickjj wrote:
| The solution I posted includes an incrementing number
| annotator btw. Satty has a lot of great features. You can
| even capture the whole screen so that you can crop it after
| you've done your annotation which is similar to how
| Flameshot works.
| dfc wrote:
| Thank you so much. This has been such a pain for me when
| I write documentation.
| manbash wrote:
| I have worked with Wayland + Flameshot for the past 2-3 years
| and it seems to work fine as far as I can tell.
| oldandboring wrote:
| I'm guessing you don't have multiple monitors :)
| __del__ wrote:
| i've been using flameshot with wayland the last six months,
| simply because i didn't know i couldn't
| garymoon wrote:
| 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)
| koiueo wrote:
| Shutter is great in terms of features. I just recently
| discovered it.
|
| But its code... Thousands (like definitely over 10k) of lines
| of procedural perl. I had a feature in mind I wanted to
| contribute and I couldn't even scratch the surface. I doubt
| this software can evolve any further.
| jszymborski wrote:
| woah, had no idea Shutter was written in Perl
| julius-fx wrote:
| Love flameshot. Did my due diligence for screenshot tools, found
| it, and never tried anything else again :)
| brightball wrote:
| Same. I tried probably 6-7 different tools on Ubuntu before I
| found Flameshot. It was everything I was looking for.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Good to know.
|
| It was number three for me, I stopped looking and sort of
| wondered if there was anything else out there better.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| 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).
| landr0id wrote:
| >But this app doesn't capture HDR.
|
| When you say the Xbox game bar accounts for it, do you mean
| video or still images? I've had HDR disabled for some time but
| I remember win+shift+s on Windows 11 capturing over-exposed
| screenshots when playing videogames.
| Fabricio20 wrote:
| The Xbox Game Bar video and still images do support HDR. They
| were the first feature to support HDR on windows. More
| recently the Snipping Tool on 11 also supports HDR, but only
| the newer one, not the older snipping tool. If you get images
| in JXR (jpeg-xr) files then you have HDR, if you get over-
| exposed pngs/jpgs then it doesnt do HDR.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| The readme suggests this is a Linux-first app and as HDR
| basically doesn't work at all on Linux(?) I don't think it's
| very surprising that this app doesn't handle it.
|
| It does a great job for my purposes - describing which buttons
| to click over email or im.
| kmarc wrote:
| Haven't used this app for ages, but yesterday I fine-tuned
| the HDR settings for my newly bought laptop under KDE/plasma,
| definitely on Linux. That readme might be outdated (or the
| tool doesn't work on KDE at all)
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Yeah I think I'm a bit outdated here. But I do think Linux
| hdr support is weak enough that many Linux-oriented apps
| are unlikely to do it well
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| My understanding of the landscape currently is that KDE
| Plasma is the only major DE that supports HDR. I use it for
| Steam for that reason.
| jakkos wrote:
| HDR videos and games (both native and proton) work in both
| KDE and Gnome (and supposedly Sway and Hyprland, but I
| haven't tried either). I think support in KDE/Gnome landed in
| a stable release ~6 months ago.
|
| The HDR experience on KDE is about as good as the Windows
| one. Last time I tried Gnome, there was no way to configure
| SDR and HDR brightness separately, but it was definitely
| still usable.
| pm3003 wrote:
| The problem was not only in KDE but also in NVIDIA drivers
| iiuc. For my setting HDR has been stably working on KDE
| since early 2025.
| bityard wrote:
| KDE has its own native screenshot tool called spectacle that
| I find works as least a well, if not better, than flameshot.
| (No idea about HDR, though.)
| pseudohadamard wrote:
| Yeah, it doesn't seem to be the thing for Windows. For
| example its capture hotkey is PrtScrn which has been the
| Windows built-in capture key since approximately the Bronze
| Age, and then there's modifiers for whether you want to
| capture one window or everything, and if you really want to
| get fancy the Snipping Tool, all of them already built into
| the OS.
| Fabricio20 wrote:
| This has been my experience as well, I've searched high and low
| for a screenshot software that supports HDR and found none.
| It's the sole reason I have HDR disabled. At least microsoft
| updated snipping tool now, but the usability is nothing close
| compared to Flameshot or Lightshot.
| cipehr wrote:
| For what it's worth, I notice this week that the built in
| macOs screenshot tool will capture in HDR.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I did some Googling to discover if Qt supports HDR on MacOS. It
| looks like support is currently limited, but it is an area of
| active development.
|
| 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.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| What does "HDR" do in a computer screen? We're talking about
| high dynamic range, right?
| iLemming wrote:
| 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.
| haunter wrote:
| I wish ShareX was available on Linux
| https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX
| system2 wrote:
| I agree. ShareX for Windows is flawless in my opinion.
| treovchinn wrote:
| it by default uploads screenshots to public imgur, which was
| surprising and a no go for corporate setting, you can change
| that in setting, but it is still wants too do too many things
| CubityFirst wrote:
| I'm vaguely involved w/ ShareX, so take this however you
| want.
|
| It doesn't as of a recent update (due to continued
| stability issues at Imgur). The default behavior is to not
| upload anymore.
|
| Additionally ShareX pops up a big red warning telling you
| that you're about to upload. There are some forks (see:
| ShareNot) that explicitly remove any uploading, but by
| default there is a registry key, a setting, and a big
| warning that you can enable that disables uploading.
| system2 wrote:
| I always used my own FTP provider with my own URL. So they
| always looked like share.example.com/15udn18.jpg
|
| Embeddable as well. Anyone with a website should use this
| method so they can maximize the use of their hosting.
| anotheryou wrote:
| ShareX (win) > CleanShot (mac, paid) > Fireshot
|
| just video is waaay better in cleanshot than it is in shareX
| (and a bit simpler to set up)
| tripflag wrote:
| Good news is there are ongoing efforts to make that happen;
| https://github.com/SnapXL/SnapX
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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.
| KetoManx64 wrote:
| Spectacle is great. I tried to switch to it from Flameshot a
| few months back since it has all the features that I use
| regularly in Flameshot but ran into an issue where it would 2-3
| times longer than Flameshot to start up when starting it up
| through the CLI. I use keymapper to map all my keyboard
| shortcuts and starting Spectacle using Qdbus is very slow
| compares to flameshot, like 1-2 seconds of waiting after
| pressing the hotkey compared to Flameshot being instant.
|
| Looks like someone found a workaround by having spectacle run
| as a systemd process and restart after closing though, I'll
| have to give it a try: https://discuss.kde.org/t/make-
| spectacle-launch-faster/38030...
| morkalork wrote:
| 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_
| gegtik wrote:
| increase the border size. more. yes. in the bloodiest red. yes.
| its rectangle time
| onesandofgrain wrote:
| Flameshot like Lightshot the one on chrome?
| reboot81 wrote:
| Lightshot, if youre using it you should remove it and then
| google why.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| If you have something to say, say it. People don't have the
| time to go investigate, but maybe you have something
| interesting to claim with a source.
|
| For all I know you found a way to tie some software to a
| politician you want me to hate, or the guy that wrote it
| donated to $50 to a cause you don't like, or they murdered
| beagle puppies in some horrendous way. Just spit it out.
| burnermore wrote:
| Yeah. This is like clickbait titles. They hate something
| something for something something reason and won't tell cos
| it's probably something small.
|
| They leave the comment making it look like the person made
| something huge. Only to find out that they didn't use the
| coaster while drinking his chilled beer.
|
| And I don't care about this instance, I am not going to
| look it up. I have far more negative vibes about the OP in
| question than Lightshot.
|
| Very bad dark pattern I've been seeing more and more these
| days.
| imtringued wrote:
| Lightshot is a cloud-first screenshot tool. This means
| you shouldn't screenshot sensitive information. That's
| all I could find.
|
| Considering that there are many tools like ShareX where
| uploading the screenshot is a feature, I don't really see
| reboot81's poor attempt at "spreading awareness" as
| genuine.
| b1temy wrote:
| 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
| shane_kerns wrote:
| On my Mac all I see is a gray screen when I'm using the app. It
| used to work on my Mac until a year ago.
| tuananh wrote:
| ksnip is pretty damn good too.
| sirtoffski wrote:
| Was looking to see if anyone had mentioned ksnip. Agreed, it's
| great.
| _philipalan wrote:
| How do you resize a rectangle made with the rectangle tool?
| richardanaya wrote:
| I love this app, use it all the time.
| gnabgib wrote:
| Popular in:
|
| 2022 (114 points, 30 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30071766
|
| 2021 (335 points, 84 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113753
| roggenbuck wrote:
| Flameshot is excellent! I've been happily using it for years.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| It's VERY GOOD...
|
| 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?
| syradar wrote:
| Love Flameshot! Been using it for years since its cross platform
| so it works on macOS at home and Windows at work.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Flameshot is the best. I don't know about HD, and maybe if I get
| a HD screen I'll find out, but right now it's the slickest
| self_awareness wrote:
| Spectacle for KDE is also a good choice.
|
| https://apps.kde.org/spectacle/
|
| I found Flameshot to work flawlessly only on Linux X11 and
| Windows. Other platforms (Wayland, macOS) have problems.
| treovchinn wrote:
| 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
| p2hari wrote:
| This is one of the must have apps on my mac. Combined with
| hammerspoon or even Raycast, you can do quite a bit of things.
| honghe wrote:
| Use Flameshot with powertoys on windows 11, powertoys can remap
| shortcut: win+shift+f23 to PrintScreen.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| As a long time (accidental) Flameshot user on Debian Linux, I was
| surprised to just now learn that Flameshot is written using the
| cross-platform C++ GUI library Qt. I guess that explains how it
| works on Microsoft Windows, Linux (X11/Wayland), and MacOS!
| akimbostrawman wrote:
| Flameshot is great! I also use it to capture different language
| text in images that gets piped into tesseract for offline OCR.
| major505 wrote:
| I use it daily. Great little app for taking screenshots on mac,
| since the macapp is terrible, and the keyboard binding is even
| worse.
| figmert wrote:
| Flameshot isn't great on macOS, does anyone know of a good open
| source alternative they would recommend?
| rwbaskette wrote:
| Funny, I found flameshot years ago looking for a Linux to
| Skitch. What's lacking in the built-in tool?
| figmert wrote:
| I'm unsure what Flameshot on macOS has to do with Flameshot
| Linux? I used to use Flameshot on Linux, and it works great,
| though I've always found the built-in screenshot software for
| Linux good enough. The application doesn't work as smoothly
| on macOS and I wouldn't need a tool for screenshots if the
| built-in tooling was any good. It's like it was designed by
| someone who had created a screenshot for the first time in
| their life.
| latexr wrote:
| Hard to say without knowing what your needs are. What's wrong
| with using macOS' native tools? They work great not only for
| capturing but for annotation. What exactly are you looking for?
| figmert wrote:
| The app has a constant item on the bar at the bottom.
| Quitting that quits the whole application, I couldn't find a
| setting to change this behaviour. But I could live with that
| if it wasn't for it somehow switching desktops when you start
| taking a screenshot. It switches desktop, goes back to the
| main one, then starts the set up. Of course that also means
| it takes a couple of seconds before the screenshot gets
| taken.
| asimovDev wrote:
| what do you use Flameshot for on macOS? if you want to edit
| stuff, you can set the screenshot tool to open the screenshot
| in Preview.app where you can perform basic editing on it
| (cmd+shift+5 and then click Options and choose "Preview" in
| "Save to")
| figmert wrote:
| The built-in screenshot tool is the thing I'm trying to
| replace. Editing is less of an issue. I rarely need to edit.
| iLemming wrote:
| > Flameshot isn't great on macOS
|
| What do you mean? For what it does, it absolutely works nicely
| on mac.
| marcusrm12 wrote:
| Looks great!
| greuceanu42069 wrote:
| This is my go-to screenshot tool for Ubuntu. I've even gone as
| far as replacing the default printscreen with this using Custom
| Shortcuts. Word of warning, however: it is somehwat buggy when
| trying to add more than 1 text boxes on the screenshot.
| skeptrune wrote:
| Flameshot is fantastic software. Works great on Linux and gets
| the job done.
| duxup wrote:
| Flameshot is my go to on macOS.
| rhamonrye wrote:
| Localising this in KDE + HDR in terms of clang improvements.
| _345 wrote:
| I forget why but I ended up going back to Lightshot after trying
| this
| nikolay wrote:
| This has been a savor for me! I'm tired of screenshot tools that
| don't let you precisely crop the shot and require you to use
| editing software. Flameshot with its magnifier is next level.
| mrexcess wrote:
| OS-native functionality covers this?
|
| On Macs = cmd + shift + 4
|
| On Windows = win + shift + s
|
| On Gnome/KDE = shift + printscreen
| nikolay wrote:
| They don't let you precisely select the area of the screen
| you want a snapshot of!
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(page generated 2026-01-30 23:01 UTC)