When I press the Print Screen button, it will not appear in "Save Screenshot" window.

GNOME Screenshot 3.3.2 - 6th February 2012
==========================================

- Make non-interactive mode headless
- Update to the new shell Screenshot API
- Port to GApplication

Here, »headless« means that no dialog is shown anymore. The screenshots are placed in your »Pictures« folder silently.
You can choose another folder via GSettings, but you cannot show the dialog. The only way to get that is to start gnome-screenshot with -i.

BTW, could you take a screenshot of your semi-translucent terminal? How do the fonts look?

To change the destination directory

gsettings set org.gnome.gnome-screenshot auto-save-directory 'file:///home/xyzxyz/Desktop'

I would not expect this to change, gnome changed it, unlikely ubuntu will revert
(similar to when gnome changed the file naming of screens from <whatever>.ext where <whatever> was based on window title & made 'sense', to the current date/time format
Didn't like that but nothing to be done other than redoing the source which wasn't worth it

I think this should be escalated to upstream to challenge the notion that silently putting uninformatively named files into an unseen folder is a good idea. It just creates confusion and unnecessary work.

That this behaviour trips people up is evidenced by 6 dupes within one day

How do I link upstream bugs nowadays?

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669629

this appears to be the offending commit
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-screenshot/commit/?id=3bbc1e158fd58ec7f4f984f6d3c15ec95e65a035
can we patch it back in? The dialog with a preview is a lovely feature, way better than silently putting it on the clipboard or silently saving it.

How is a new user supposed to know
- where the screenshot lands?
- when using common shortcuts it may need an edit of a .desktop file with -i option?
- to install dconf-tools in order to access UI settings?

There is no auto-save-directory selected, alt and alt+print deliberately saves the screenshot in 'pictures' folder, where also unity-greeter takes access. It also ignores the last used directory.

Thanks, that need consideration but that's neither a regression not an important bug, the new behaviour is what new devices out there like phones or tablets do

The new behaviour is a bit disturbing first but is basically:

- is what phones and tablets do nowadays, a sound and visual effect and store to the image directory, so something quite some users should be used to
- the non interactive behaviour is limited to keybinding, if you run gnome-screenshot from i.e unity you will get the ui with the choices and the confirmation dialog
- a change which can get some "getting used to" but that makes sense once you know how the feature work

I don't think we should revert as a knee jerk reaction but rather see for a while how that works

Cc-ing ayatana-design to get their input, that would be interesting to test in user testing sessions

Some possible options:

- revert to the old behaviour
- keep the new one as it is
- keep the new one but add notifications telling you "screenshot stored at ..."

Note that those screenshots should show in the dash home screen "recent files" (if they don't that's a bug we will fix) so should be easy to access this way as well

@seb the main issue I find is that I didn't know where the screen shots had gone, if there was some logic to where they went I would have been fine but they went to a folder I do not use. Where as before I could select their destination. On a phone or a tablet I know exactly where to go as its explicit.

It’s more about the immediate option to rename, the option to copy to clipboard, the option to preview, and the option to drag the thumbnail to another app directly.

I don’t have a smart phone.

Also, I keep camera photos in my Pictures folder, screenshots don’t belong there.

#14
+1

#12
> those screenshots should show in the dash home screen "recent files" (if they don't that's a bug we will fix)

Just tested on laptop (install since alpha-1), no recent screenshot displayed.
Just tested on desktop-pc (install alpha-2 four days ago), recent screenshot displayed.

#16 Erratum:
< Just tested on laptop (install since alpha-1), no recent screenshot displayed. >

My bad, apologies, alm was in the way. Recent screenshots are also displayed on laptop.

if you want the options to rename etc run gnome-screenshot and use the interactive ui?

Sebastien, when there is a need to take a series of screenshots and use them further right away, going through the g-s desktop app would require an order of magnitude more steps. The previous system was really quite efficient.

It’s not even possible to get the old behaviour back through the use of modified keybindings, because with -i you get two windows. The first window is unnecessary, the second OTOH window is helpful.

What was your workflow? GNOME is adding keybinding to directly copy the screenshot to the clipboard, so if you need that the new way will be less steps than the old one, just a keybinding and paste in your application for example

Seb, do you have a link to Gnome design document handy? Any discussion about this? Mailing list posts?

If we add a keystroke for copy to clipboard we would have:

 • Print : whole screen
 • <Alt>Print : focussed window
 • <xyz>Print : copy to clipboard, but what? window, desktop, area?

The old system was a good solution, I don’t get this. Is it just plain old feature-remov-itis?

I mean

In one direction:

  <PrtScr>, but I don’t care, just save: 1x Enter/click , the window is gone, result like now.

in the other direction:

  click, click, click, scan, scroll, click, window, click, click button.

or

 <PrtScr>, click, click, file browser, looong list, scan it, open some generic files to find the right picture, copy, paste

Not sure if GNOME has design documents for such changes

To answer my own question, in gnome-control-center git there are slots for *six* keybindings now!
That doesn’t sound like a very thought-out strategy to map six bindings only to avoid that one little dialog.

And, to wit, we don’t have the new gnome-settings-daemon with media-keys, we’re stuck with the old system.

http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-control-center/tree/panels/keyboard/01-screenshot.xml.in

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<KeyListEntries group="system" schema="org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys" _name="Screenshots">

 <KeyListEntry name="screenshot"
                      _description="Take a screenshot"/>

 <KeyListEntry name="window-screenshot"
                      _description="Take a screenshot of a window"/>

 <KeyListEntry name="area-screenshot"
                      _description="Take a screenshot of an area"/>

 <KeyListEntry name="screenshot-clip"
                      _description="Copy a screenshot to clipboard"/>

 <KeyListEntry name="window-screenshot-clip"
                      _description="Copy a screenshot of a window to clipboard"/>

 <KeyListEntry name="area-screenshot-clip"
                      _description="Copy a screenshot of an area to clipboard"/>

</KeyListEntries>

I found the FIXED bug where the change was put foward:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652487

It’s not just feature-remov-itis, it’s Morbus McCannia. I must say I disagree diametrically with the optimal workflow suggested there.

And what is the solution we must apply to not do it from the terminal?

@ #26
Workaround with ccsm gnome-compatibility took their decision off my back.

In fact if I think a solution was obvious, that since the beginning of the problem the screenshots is being performed by pressing PrintScreen or writing to the terminal, but if we capture after a certain time or select a window or some to capture this area can not be done now as it was before, with the program manager screenshots

I feel this is a security issue.

Having someone hit PrintScreen by mistake and having the contents of whatever they were doing basically silently stored in the pictures folder is quite evil.

We need to either disable the hotkey unless the app is running, or pop up the dialog like we used to.

By default, on Ubuntu, the Pictures folder is readable by all other users...

+1, we need the screenshot app to pop up and offer the user to save the
shot. It can default to the pictures folder and appropriate filename,
but the user should have choice to cancel or redirect.

Mark

+1 as well, making as a design priority.

I'll suggest adding a gsettings option to make interactive mode default — so we'll be able to adjust default behaviour without applying any patches.

Ok, seems there is much hate for that tablet like behaviour, I told GNOME that users hate it and will look at reverting it ;-)

Indeed this is quite a hideous usability regression on normal desktop systems at least, so +1 for reverting. Thanks Seb.

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-screenshot - 3.3.2-0ubuntu3

---------------
gnome-screenshot (3.3.2-0ubuntu3) precise; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/ubuntu_interactive_screenshots.patch:
    - on Unity sessions display a confirmation dialog after taking
      screenshots with the keybindings, the auto saving behaviour is
      confusing our users (lp: #927952)
 -- Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:47:18 +0100

Hi Seb, thank you, but your fix doesn’t help when I don’t use Unity.

Why did you think this only applies to Unity users?

Tobias, because we keep being asked by GNOME upstream and GNOME user to let their desktop alone and ship it as designed so that's what we try to do, we stick to upstream behaviour for GNOME environments and take design decision for Unity

Oh yes, fair enough. I guess in other situations I was of the same opinion, just not this time. I’m getting schizophrenic here.

Just WASTED 30 minutes trying to capture a screenshot for another bug on my 12.04 system (Gnome fallback) before finally finding this change.

Talk about making simple things difficult for people - what happens if someone doesn't have sound and they just keep hitting "Print Screen" waiting for something to appear to be "Pasted" as has been the norm for... for.... for... since forever!

As someone has mentioned in another thread, ONLY having sound feedback as the sole confirmation of the Print Screen function being used is totally discriminatory to any deaf Ubuntu users (let alone those with no working sound on their systems).

This is a totally regressive change and is now beyond the "preferences" of the developers, it clearly breaks the fundamentals of providing a Linux environment able to be used by those not blessed with all the abilities that most take for granted.

There must be some visual feedback because the function is associated with the visual medium (and separating an action in one medium from the feedback in another is such poor programming that I am struggling to find an excuse for such bone-headedness).

This is a regression, clear guidance was given to have the screenshot
dialog show on PrintScreen.

Mark

The behaviour didn't regress, the desktop team just decided to stop spending time changing GNOME behaviour and to focus on Unity which is our default desktop, we changed the behaviour only for Unity there.

 It's also something most GNOME users asked us to do, let the GNOME session be a real GNOME session and not an Ubuntu one.

@David: you decided to use GNOME fallback you get GNOME fallback, if you are unhappy about GNOME design choices you should open a bug on bugzilla.gnome.org to tell them about it

@seb128
Then I'm wondering what is the point of still using GNOME as main DE if Ubuntu devs don't like it.
Is it a good approach to patch everything in GNOME to adapt it to the Unity context?
This behaviour imho create big discrepancies between the two projects. GNOME is taking is own road and I believe
in future these projects will divert so much that some simple patches won't be enough. Please fix this kind of issue :)

@Lucazade

> Then I'm wondering what is the point of still using GNOME as main DE if Ubuntu devs don't like it.

We don't, we use Unity as our main DE (even if it's using a lot of GNOME techs)

> Is it a good approach to patch everything in GNOME to adapt it to the Unity context?

No, that's why as said we are reducing our number of patching when we can

> GNOME is taking is own road and I believe in future these projects will divert so much that some simple patches won't be enough

right, which is why Unity is moved from a patched GNOME session and why you can get back GNOME upstream look and feel in Ubuntu (still some work to do but we plan to continue in that direction)

On 28/03/12 10:23, Lucazade wrote:
> This behaviour imho create big discrepancies between the two projects. GNOME is taking is own road and I believe
> in future these projects will divert so much that some simple patches won't be enough. Please fix this kind of issue :)

That is not an *engineering* challenge :)

thanks Seb and Mark for the answers. really appreciated.
I just hope there will be more collaboration between Unity and GNOME than challenge. Closing my OT :)

This now works for me as of todays livecd 64bit iso install:

 gnome-screenshot = 3.3.92-0ubuntu2

Anyone who wants to bring the point of accessibility to upstreams attention, please add it here:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669629

Please note, that in Gnome Shell you get a white flash in addition to the camera shutter sound. Perhaps this doesn’t happen in classic mode. If so please add this.

The issue of discoverability was raised there too, but apparently upstream thinks that before, doing screenshots was work and now there’s less work involved. I cannot follow the logic, but the logic is put forward here:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652487

I need to agree with many other commenters here that this is a severe usability problem. (I'm referring to principles at http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html)

1) It violates standards/contradicts previous experiences.
a) The experiences of ubuntu/gnome users who are used to the dialogue.
b) The experiences of former windows users who are used to the clipboard solution.

 2) and gives not enought feedback to find out where the screenshots have gone.
There is no established standard where screenshots should go. While the discussion at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652487 named it "reasonable" there are some other resonable locations it could go to (e.g. Desktop)
Personally it took me 30min to find out what was going on.

The dialouge was according to the standard and gave visibility to actions and where your data went. The new solution does only tell you that something happened.

Confirmed on Debian Testing ("Wheezy"), kernel version: 3.2.0-2-amd64.
The bug appared after a recent update.

When pressing "PrintScreen" button no dialog window appears , only clicking sound and a flash. No screenshots can be found in the Bilder/Pictures folder.

It works correctly only when executing a command "gnome-screenshot --interactive"

Ok, I've got the idea from post #4 here, it's not a bug, it's a feature.
It's slightly not usual, may there be an option to make it work like before?

The linux-linaro kernel is community maintained and should be tracked in its own bug and not part of the supported kernel cadence process. If someone would like to provide updates for the linux-linaro kernel, please file a new bug and follow https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/UpdateProcedures. Thanks.

Oops! This was obviously not meant for this bug. Sorry for the noise.

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/927952

Are Gnome actually fixing this upstream, the bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669629 didn't seem very decisive.

I've just wasted 25mins trying to find where Gnome dumps screenshots to.

Excuse me? It says "fix released", but where is the fix? I am using 12.04 with Unity, everything is up to date. When I try to take a screenshot with PrtSc I hear a shutter sound and see a flash, but no dialogue box and no screenshot is saved in ~/Pictures. Do I need to tweak some settings?

Never mind. Turned out the problem was that I have installed shutter, even after removing it the keybinding persists. Here is the solution in case anyone encounters the same problem. http://askubuntu.com/questions/30701/keyboard-shortcuts-not-working-after-removing-shutter/42435#42435

IMHO this "feature" is idiotic. The time it takes to make and save screenshots is more than double, especially fi capturing areas instead of the whole screen.

Not having a simple way to change this behaviour is even worse!

So if like me you prefer the old way here is a simple fix. Create a file called gnome-screenshot somewhere that is in your path before /usr/bin (~/bin in my case) and put this into it:

#!/bin/bash
exec /usr/bin/gnome-screenshot -i

Then make it executable (chmod 755 gnome-screenshot) and voila!
It works AS IT IS SUPPOSED to.

Still crashing in Quantal the popup for save the image with Gnome session (without effects) and I can't save the screenshot file:

$gnome-screenshot --delay 3
** Message: Unable to use GNOME Shell's builtin screenshot interface, resorting to fallback X11.

I only can get work and make a screenshot with interactive option:

$ gnome-screenshot --interactive
** Message: Unable to use GNOME Shell's builtin screenshot interface, resorting to fallback X11.

This makes possible make the screenshot but the warning is still showed.

I have a thin client environment - no way to have graphics hardware acceleration. gnome-screenshot depends on gnome-shell but has no dependency on the package. I cannot install gnome-shell i use the fallback mode. As a work around i have installed the xfce4 screenshot tool and just created a link named /usr/bin/gnome-screenshot pointing to /usr/bin/xfce4-screenshooter. This way i get the xfce4 screenshot dialog by pressing <prtscr>, which is working good for me. With more of these defective gnome and unity developments i will be forced to completely change to xfce sooner or later....

Just recently upgraded to bionic, and after using it for a while I mostly got used to it, but the one feature that keeps bothering me painfully is the lack of the printscreen dialog. I understand the initiative to adopt gnome standards, but this is introducing a big inconvenience in comparison to how it was functional in the Unity desktop. It is not just about being able to save printscreens to an arbitrary location under an arbitrary name. It is even more importantly being able to copy a printscreen into a clipboard without saving it to a file on a disk. I used to be able to just copy a printscreen and Ctrl+V it into a IM window, a email client or any webapp. Now I have to take additional steps to open file manager, navigate to the Pictures folder, locate the one printscreen file I need among other ones, and drag&drop it to where I need it, then, delete it. The functionality and user experience has decreased significantly for me, and on top of that I get constantly annoyed by it. I wish Canonical shipped the previous user experience with the new gnome-desktop based Ubuntu. Even as an opt-in!

Just use ctrl+PrtSc to send to clipboard

On Jun 10, 2018 10:04 PM, "Kris" <email address hidden> wrote:

Just recently upgraded to bionic, and after using it for a while I
mostly got used to it, but the one feature that keeps bothering me
painfully is the lack of the printscreen dialog. I understand the
initiative to adopt gnome standards, but this is introducing a big
inconvenience in comparison to how it was functional in the Unity
desktop. It is not just about being able to save printscreens to an
arbitrary location under an arbitrary name. It is even more importantly
being able to copy a printscreen into a clipboard without saving it to a
file on a disk. I used to be able to just copy a printscreen and Ctrl+V
it into a IM window, a email client or any webapp. Now I have to take
additional steps to open file manager, navigate to the Pictures folder,
locate the one printscreen file I need among other ones, and drag&drop
it to where I need it, then, delete it. The functionality and user
experience has decreased significantly for me, and on top of that I get
constantly annoyed by it. I wish Canonical shipped the previous user
experience with the new gnome-desktop based Ubuntu. Even as an opt-in!

--
You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to a
duplicate bug report (928364).
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/927952

Title:
  When I press the Print Screen button, it will not appear in "Save
  Screenshot" window.

Status in Ayatana Design:
  Fix Released
Status in Gnome Screenshot:
  Expired
Status in gnome-screenshot package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in gnome-screenshot source package in Precise:
  Fix Released
Status in gnome-screenshot package in Debian:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  When taking a screenshot with Print Screen or Alt+Print Screen a
  dialog box asking you what and where to save the file no longer
  appears. So while you hear a camera sound you have no other
  confirmation that a screenshot was really taken. Additionally, there
  is no way of knowing where the screenshot went. I'd imagine this will
  be particularly problematic for new users of Ubuntu.

  ProblemType: BugDistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
  Package: gnome-screenshot 3.3.2-0ubuntu2
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-14.23-generic 3.2.3
  Uname: Linux 3.2.0-14-generic x86_64
  ApportVersion: 1.91-0ubuntu1
  Architecture: amd64
  Date: Mon Feb 6 23:54:17 2012
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Alpha amd64
(20111129.1)SourcePackage: gnome-screenshot
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to precise on 2012-01-27 (10 days ago)

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ayatana-design/+bug/927952/+subscriptions

this: "because we keep being asked by GNOME upstream and GNOME user to let their desktop alone and ship it as designed so that's what we try to do, we stick to upstream behaviour for GNOME environments and take design decision for Unity", this is BS!

How about all of the Unity users who now are migrating to Gnome desktop and get productivity decrease because of this limiting new behavior (new to us). Why not to create a settings somewhere, can be even opt-in, to use the dialog with screenshot?

On unity I hit prntscr button, copy to clipboard and Ctrl+V into Telegram/Slack/Goodle Drive/Pinta/LibreImpress/etc. No files to delte afterwards. Unless I want to save it on disk. Gnome behavior is a downgrade to us unity users. Please give a choice to us also, not just gnome users :(

+1 Kris

GNOME in all is a downgrade for Unity users, I don't understand why Ubuntu choose GNOME now, even if X.org is back...

When a Ubuntu Unity remix?

Kris, generally people won't see comments on closed bugs. Please open new bugs for new issues.

But try this:
1. Open the Settings app.
2. Navigate to Devices > Keyboard.
3. About halfway down the page are keyboard shortcuts for saving screenshots directly to the "clipboard".

Basically, just hold down the Ctrl key while using your usual keyboard shortcut.

This is mentioned briefly in
https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/screen-shot-record.html

Also, if you want to choose the name for the screenshot, just use the Screenshot app instead of the keyboard shortcut.

Hi,

I have gnome-screenshot installed on several desktops, all on the last ubuntu version.

Since fews days, on all computers, everytime I do "copy to clipboard" after the screen shot, if I close the screenshot application, my clipboard became Empty.

Now i have to keep the application opened to be able to paste my picture.

Before I was abble to close then paste....
Now i can't.

thankyou

Hi
I have a similar problem, but I use an extension to do my screenshots, but I seem each time you close an app, you clipboard is empty....

It's a strange behaviour....

I just test the same behaviour with gedit (copy text, close gedit, paste somewhere) it's works fine

Please open a new bug report using the command 'ubuntu-bug gnome-screenshot' for any issues you are having with gnome-screenshot. Using ubuntu-bug will gather information about your system automatically for you so that we have more details about your setup. Thanks!