XFree Screenshots: Import

The import program offers you a nice and quick way to take screenshots from your X server and saving it in a variety of formats. It belongs to the ImageMagick package which contains tools to create edit and convert images.

• Selecting which part of your screen to take the shot from

  A simple call of import blarg.png will present you with a mouse cursor to select a rectangular section of the current screen which will then be saved to the file blarg.png.

• Taking a shot from the whole screen

  Instead of selecting your whole screen with the previously described method let import decide what belongs to “your whole screen” by running import -window root blarg.png.

• Choosing the format of the screenshot

  The format is selected by the extension of the filename that is specified, e.g.

  import blarg.png   # saves screenshots as png
  import blarg.eps   # captures your screen into an eps file
  

• Some useful options:

  Option	Description
  -colors VALUE	Preferred number of colours in image
  -crop WIDTHxHEIGHT{+-}X{+-}Y[%]	Crop the image
  -monochrome	Convert the image to greyscale
  -negate	Replace the colour of every pixel to its complementary colour
  -quality VALUE	This option sets the jpg/miff/png compression quality ranging from 0 to 100 corresponding to lowest quality/highest compression and highest quality/lowest compression, respectively.
  -resize WIDTHxHEIGHT{%}{!}	The supplied width and height are maximum values because import will maintain the aspect ratio and resize the image accordingly. You may also leave out either width or height to force the missing value to be calculated by import to honour the aspect ratio. If there is a good reason to distort the image by resizing append an exclamation mark which will cause import to not honour the aspect ratio. By appending % the supplied values for width and height are interpreted as percentages of the original values.

For more options, please refer to the ImageMagick(1) man page.