Screencloud
Version: 1.3.1 Web: http://bit.ly/2swwLaP
It wasn’t too long ago that we admired the super-useful Ksnip in LXF223 and mentioned that it took the best features of Snipping Tools from Windows while adding extra features on top of it. But in the end, it still wasn’t the perfect solution, and we continued our search for a more feature-packed screenshot-taking application.
If you work with image grabs that you need to annotate, it’s hard to underestimate the value of a good screenshot tool. It should be capable of doing more than just capturing windows or custom areas. For instance, uploading images to specialised web services (for sharing desktop eye-candy), drawing arrows and circles, numbering objects, highlighting screen elements, and others tasks.
Screencloud is a cross-platform client to the Screencloud.net web service. Although it looks like a commercial venture, it definitely isn’t. The website, together with the desktop client, is a one-man effort and an open source project.
The application enables you to capture a full-screen image, a window or a custom area. But the main benefit of Screencloud is in its ability to postprocess captures with the built-in editor. The program makes it possible to add smooth arrows, text labels, elliptical or rectangular shapes and – what we liked most of all – automatically numbered round labels.
There are only five drawing tools, but they’re very welcome because there are no other Qt5-based tool that can do a similar job. Your export options are limited, though. Screencloud can send an image to the official web storage, or copy it to the clipboard. Additionally, the program can upload to Dropbox, Imgur, custom (S)FTP server or to the local file: you just need to press the More services button in the application’s preferences window and tick the desired boxes. Furthermore, there are dozens of extra plug-ins for Screencloud on the Github.
Screencloud has been created using Python and Qt, but it turned out to be capricious to build and install as long as it enables you to use Python 2 and 3 together with Qt4 or 5 in any combination. As always, users of mainstream Linux distros will be up and running with the program in no time.
“What we liked most are automatically numbered round labels.”