Tricks to reduce the size and keep the quality of screenshots

[lmuserx4849]

I thought I was really happy with KSnapshot in KDE4 (not sure what it is called in KDE5), until I came across Shutter. Wow. Super nice. Lots of features.
My only concern, is it being maintained, and that's sort of a big one

Having said that, I still end up, resizing, reducing colors, or reducing quality. I'm thinking a screenshot should be less than 100k.

Many years ago, I use to reduce the display resolution, but I'm hesitate to do that these days because I've had some experiences where the desktop got really hosed.

Do you have any tricks to reduce the size and keep the quality of screenshots?

[phd21]

Hi lmuserx4849,

I use to use Ksnapshot all the time and still do sometimes, but now my default screen capture (printscreen) application is the excellent "Ksnip" application which can now scale and image either a screenshot or open an image. On my system, I can usually do 80% of the original image to get below the current less than 200kb image size limit of this forum and they still look great; depending on your screen resolution and or image resolution, you may have to use a lower percentage. A little experimentation will give you the typical scaling percentage for your screenshots to get below the forum limit.

FYI - "ksnip" really nice screen capture app with Imgur upload and built-in painter functions - Linux Mint Forums
viewtopic.php?f=47&t=260112&hilit=screenshot

Uploading a screenshot, image, or images to this forum
viewtopic.php?f=42&t=232332&hilit=screenshot

Hope this helps ...

[BenTrabetere]

My only concern, is it being maintained, and that's sort of a big one

The best I can tell it is being maintained. The current version (0.94) was released Sept 2017, and it was mostly a bug fix release.

Having said that, I still end up, resizing, reducing colors, or reducing quality. I'm thinking a screenshot should be less than 100k.

Why the 100kb limit?

Do you have any tricks to reduce the size and keep the quality of screenshots?

If you reduce the size of the file you also reduce the quality of the image. You can't have one without the other.

One way to reduce the work is to edit the Preferences for Shutter. In the Main tab there is a setting Compression - setting it to 7 (for PNG) or 70 (for JPG) will produce a smaller file with decent results.

You can also set the default Image Format. I think the initial default is PNG, but you can also use BMP and JPG. The only formats I would consider are JPG and PNG, and PNG should produce smaller files.

I use PNG because it suits my needs. However, if I were to adopt a strict 100kb limit to screenshots I would switch to JPG, and then use the ImageMagick Convert tool to resize the image.

Code: Select all

convert input.jpg -define jpeg:extent=100kb output.jpg

[lmuserx4849]

ksnip looks nice. I'll definitely look at those links.

A few things that caught my eye:
- you can select a window by name, not just active window.
- you can automatically save the file and there is some flexibility with the file name template
- tab view of images
- there's a lot of options that I haven't gotten to yet. I watched the short videos that they have online. The flexibility in grabbing what you want down to the pixel

I didn't try any of the editing, web capture, or exif. Capturing a web page via url is neat. Now I use FF web dev tools > Dev toolbar > screenshot.

I've been looking at images on the forum that folks upload, and often the ones I like are no more than 100k. I looked at the "Forum Rules, Guidelines, and Policy" and nothing caught my eye on size limit. I hate wasting resources I play around with Gimp export and jpeg quality and keep png compression level to 9. So it seems I'm doing everything I'm suppose to