ksnip

Version v1.11.0

Ksnip is a Qt-based cross-platform screenshot tool that provides many annotation features for your screenshots.

Features

Latest ksnip version contains following features:

• Supports Linux (X11, Plasma Wayland, GNOME Wayland and xdg-desktop-portal Wayland), Windows and macOS.
• Screenshot of a custom rectangular area that can be drawn with mouse cursor.
• Screenshot of last selected rectangular area without selecting again.
• Screenshot of the screen/monitor where the mouse cursor is currently located.
• Screenshot of full-screen, including all screens/monitors.
• Screenshot of window that currently has focus.
• Screenshot of window under mouse cursor.
• Screenshot with or without mouse cursor.
• Capture mouse cursor as annotation item that can be moved and deleted.
• Customizable capture delay for all capture options.
• Upload screenshots directly to imgur.com in anonymous or user mode.
• Upload screenshots via FTP in anonymous or user mode.
• Upload screenshots via custom user defined scripts.
• Command-line support, for capturing screenshots and saving to default location, filename and format.
• Filename wildcards for Year ($Y), Month ($M), Day ($D), Time ($T) and Counter (multiple # characters for number with zero-leading padding).
• Print screenshot or save it to PDF/PS.
• Annotate screenshots with pen, marker, rectangles, ellipses, texts and other tools.
• Annotate screenshots with stickers and add custom stickers.
• Crop and cut out vertical/horizontal slices of images.
• Obfuscate image regions with blur and pixelate.
• Add effects to image (Drop Shadow, Grayscale, invert color or Border).
• Add watermarks to captured images.
• Global hotkeys for capturing screenshots (currently only for Windows and X11).
• Tabs for screenshots and images.
• Open existing images via dialog, drag-and-drop or paste from clipboard.
• Run as single instance application (secondary instances send cli parameter to primary instance).
• Pin screenshots in frameless windows that stay atop other windows.
• User-defined actions for taking screenshot and post-processing.
• OCR support through plugin (Window and Linux/Unix).
• Many configuration options.

Supported Screenshot Types

* xdg-desktop-portal screenshots are screenshots taken by the compositor and passed to ksnip, you will see a popup dialog that required additional confirmation, the implementation can vary depending on the compositor. Currently, Snaps and Gnome Wayland >= 41 only support xdg-desktop-portal screenshots, this is a limitation coming from the Gnome and Snaps, non-native screenshot tools are not allowed to take screenshots in any other way except through the xdg-desktop-portal.

Installing Binaries

Binaries can be downloaded from the Releases page. Currently, RPM, DEB, APT, Snap, Flatpak and AppImage for Linux, zipped EXE for Windows and APP for macOS in a DMG package are available.

Continuous build

All supported binaries are built for every pushed commit, to be found at the top of the release page. Continuous build artifacts are not fully tested and in most cases they are work in progress, so use them with caution.

Linux

Click on the item, to expand information.

$ chmod a+x ksnip*.AppImage
$ ./ksnip*.AppImage

$ rpm -Uvh ksnip*.rpm
$ ksnip

$ sudo apt install ./ksnip*.deb
$ ksnip

$ sudo apt install ksnip

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nemonein/ksnip
sudo apt update
sudo apt install ksnip

$ sudo apt install ksnip

$ sudo pacman -S ksnip

$ yay -S ksnip-git kimageannotator-git kcolorpicker-git

$ sudo snap install ksnip

$ sudo snap install ksnip --edge

$ snap connect ksnip:network-observe
$ snap connect ksnip:network-manager-observe

$ snap connect ksnip:removable-media

$ flatpak install flathub org.ksnip.ksnip

$ flatpak run org.ksnip.ksnip

Windows

macOS

$ brew install --cask ksnip

Plugins

ksnip functionality can be extended by using plugins that need to be downloaded separately and installed or unpacked, depending on the environment. Currently, under Options > Settings > Plugins a plugin detection can be triggered either in the default location(s) or by providing a search path where to look for plugins. After clicking on "Detect", ksnip searches for known plugins and when found will list the name and version.

Default search locations

Windows: plugins directory, next to ksnip.exe
Linux/Unix: /usr/local/lib, /usr/local/lib64, /usr/lib, /usr/lib64

Version selection

The plugin must match the Qt version and build type of ksnip. If you have a ksnip version that uses Qt 15.5.X and was build in DEBUG then the plugin must match the same criteria. In most cases the latest ksnip and plugin version will be using the same Qt version, the only think that you need to watch out for is to not mix DEBUG and RELEASE build.

OCR (Window and Linux/Unix)

ksnip supports OCR by using the ksnip-plugin-ocr which utilizes Tesseract to convert Image to text. When the OCR plugin was loaded, the OCR option becomes available under Options > OCR. The latest plugin version can be found here.

Dependencies

ksnip depends on kImageAnnotator and kColorPicker which needs to be installed before building ksnip from source. Installation instructions can be found on the Github pages.

Building from source

1. Get the latest release from GitHub by cloning the repo: $ git clone https://github.com/ksnip/ksnip
2. Change to repo directory: $ cd ksnip
3. Make new build directory and enter it: $ mkdir build && cd build
4. Create the makefile and build the project: $ cmake .. && make
5. Now install the application, eventually you need to run it with sudo: $ sudo make install
6. Run the application: $ ksnip

If you are using Archlinux, you may prefer to build ksnip through AUR.

Known Issues

Snap

1. Drag and Drop might not be working when ksnip or the application that you drag and drop from/to is installed as snap. the reason being that the image is shared via the temp directory which in case of snaps are restricted and every application can only see their own files or files of the user. The workaround for this is to change the temp directory location to a user owned directory like home, document or download directory via Options > Settings > Application > Temp Directory.

Discussion & Community

If you have general questions, ideas or just want to talk about ksnip, please join our Discord or IRC server.

Contribution

Any contribution is welcome, be it code, translations or other things. Currently, we need:

• Developers for writing code and fixing bugs for linux, windows and macOS. We have only one developer and the feature requests and bugs are pilling up.
• Testers for testing releases on different OS and Distros.
• Docu writers, there are a lot of features that the casual users don't know about.
• Bug reporting, Please report any bugs or feature requests related to the annotation editor on the kImageAnnotator GitHub page under the "Issue" section. All other bugs or feature requests can be reported on the ksnip GitHub page under the "Issue" section.
• Translations - Weblate is used for translations. For translating annotator-related texts, please refer to kImageAnnotator

Donation

ksnip is a non-profitable copylefted libre software project, and still has some costs that need to be covered, like domain costs or hardware costs for cross-platform support. If you want to help or just want to appreciate the work being done by treating developers to a beer or coffee, you can do that here, donations are always welcome :)

In order to improve our MacOS support, we are trying to collect some money to buy a MacBook, you can donate here.

Also in crypto:
BTC: bc1q6cke457fk8qhxxacl4nu5q2keudtdukrqe2gx0
ETH: 0xbde87a83427D61072055596e7a746CeC5316253C
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