When it comes to screen capture and other media editing tools, Linux really falls behind in terms of good options out there compared to Windows and Mac.

For a long time I've been using the default "Screenshot" tool that comes with Ubuntu. While it works fine, it does require quite a bit of additional steps if you need to annotate the image as you have to save it first then use another tool to add the annotations and then save it again.

If you only need to do this once in a while then it's not a big deal. However, in my case running a tiny software business where my co-founder and I still handle all the support requests, having a much easier way to take screenshots and add annotations could really save a lot of time. We only provide support via email and in many cases the questions we get involve "how to do x" or "where is the option for x." The best way to usually answer questions like these is to provide a screenshot with annotations to point things out.

While there are of course a bunch of Chrome plugins out there, the ones I've tried I felt were still a bit slow as the workflow usually goes something like this:

1. Click the plugin icon in Chrome.
2. Select the capture option.
3. Select the portion of the screen to capture.
4. Hit enter to capture it.
5. Choose copy/save or edit the image.
6. Add the annotations.
7. Click "finished."
8. Copy to clipboard/save to a file.

I know most of these steps are pretty quick. But Flameshot does it much better:

1. Open Flameshot.
2. Select the portion of the screen to capture
3. (This is the best part) Add the annotations right away instead of capturing it fist then going to another step.
4. Hit enter to copy to clipboard or click the save button.

That's it, it basically cut down the steps involved in half.

It's really a pretty awesome tool. I've been using it for over a month now and I can't imagine ever going back to any of the previous tools I've used.

You can download Flameshot here: source and binaries