[solved] How to quickly crop screenshots?

Question

Hi there,
I am looking for a software recommendation that combines nicely with gnome-screenshot.
gnome-screenshot is great to quickly take a selection and copy it into the clipboard. However, sometimes I need to grab the whole screen, for instance because I need to wait for a certain window to pop up first. Yet I do not need the whole screen but just a selection.
What I usually do is the following:
1. Use gnome-screenshot to grab the whole screen after a delay of 5 seconds
2. Copy the screenshot to clipboard
3. Open GIMP to crop the screenshot to my desired selection
4. Copy the cropped screenshot to clipboard
5. Open a browser and upload it from clipboard to imgur.com
I am annoyed by step 3, to open GIMP. GIMP is totally oversized for this task.
Do you know of any small GUI that does nothing more than taking an image from clipboard, allowing me to crop it to a selection and copying back to clipboard?
Thanks for your tips!
Last edited by orschiro (2014-06-10 21:32:51)

Answer 1

1-3 the program scrot can do all of these things (wait x seconds, grab only a certain area, etc..).
4-5 I just do "imgur filename" in a terminal where imgur is this script:
#!/bin/bash
# imgur script by Bart Nagel <[email protected]>
# version 4
# I release this into the public domain. Do with it what you will.
# Required: curl
# Optional: xsel or xclip for automatically putting the URLs on the X selection
# for easy pasting
# Instructions:
# Put it somewhere in your path and maybe rename it:
# mv ~/Downloads/imgurbash.sh ~/bin/imgur
# Make it executable:
# chmod +x ~/bin/imgur
# Optional, since Alan kindly provided an API key for this script: stick your
# API key in the top:
# vim ~/bin/imgur
# Upload an image:
# imgur images/hilarious/manfallingover.jpg
# Upload multiple images:
# imgur images/delicious/cake.png images/exciting/bungeejump.jpg
# The URLs will be displayed (and the delete page's URLs will be displayed on
# stderr). If you have xsel or xclip the URLs will also be put on the X
# selection, which you can usually paste with a middle click.
# API Key provided by [email protected]
apikey="b3625162d3418ac51a9ee805b1840452"
# function to output usage instructions
function usage {
echo "Usage: $(basename $0) <filename> [<filename> [...]]" >&2
echo "Upload images to imgur and output their new URLs to stdout. Each one's" >&2
echo "delete page is output to stderr between the view URLs." >&2
echo "If xsel or xclip is available, the URLs are put on the X selection for" >&2
echo "easy pasting." >&2
# check API key has been entered
if [ "$apikey" = "Your API key" ]; then
echo "You first need to edit the script and put your API key in the variable near the top." >&2
exit 15
fi
# check arguments
if [ "$1" = "-h" -o "$1" = "--help" ]; then
usage
exit 0
elif [ $# == 0 ]; then
echo "No file specified" >&2
usage
exit 16
fi
# check curl is available
type curl >/dev/null 2>/dev/null || {
echo "Couln't find curl, which is required." >&2
exit 17
clip=""
errors=false
# loop through arguments
while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
file="$1"
shift
# check file exists
if [ ! -f "$file" ]; then
echo "file '$file' doesn't exist, skipping" >&2
errors=true
continue
fi
# upload the image
response=$(curl -F "key=$apikey" -H "Expect: " -F "image=@$file" \
http://imgur.com/api/upload.xml 2>/dev/null)
# the "Expect: " header is to get around a problem when using this through
# the Squid proxy. Not sure if it's a Squid bug or what.
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo "Upload failed" >&2
errors=true
continue
elif [ $(echo $response | grep -c "<error_msg>") -gt 0 ]; then
echo "Error message from imgur:" >&2
echo $response | sed -r 's/.*<error_msg>(.*)<\/error_msg>.*/\1/' >&2
errors=true
continue
fi
# parse the response and output our stuff
url=$(echo $response | sed -r 's/.*<original_image>(.*)<\/original_image>.*/\1/')
deleteurl=$(echo $response | sed -r 's/.*<delete_page>(.*)<\/delete_page>.*/\1/')
echo $url
echo "Delete page: $deleteurl" >&2
# append the URL to a string so we can put them all on the clipboard later
clip="$clip$url
done
# put the URLs on the clipboard if we have xsel or xclip
if [ $DISPLAY ]; then
{ type xsel >/dev/null 2>/dev/null && echo -n $clip | xsel; } \
|| { type xclip >/dev/null 2>/dev/null && echo -n $clip | xclip; } \
|| echo "Haven't copied to the clipboard: no xsel or xclip" >&2
else
echo "Haven't copied to the clipboard: no \$DISPLAY" >&2
fi
if $errors; then
exit 1
fi
About the fastest, most lightweight and also convenient way to do this for me that I have found so far.