Capturing desktop screen and add a few annotations is the best way to show someone for a how to. Or to show an interesting part of a website, application or anything. You can actually capture the whole screen or specific area of your screen and edit the resulting image with your regular drawing tools such us CorelDRAW or Inkscape. However, with their complex features, it can be waste your time.

There is a quicker way to capture your screen and add a few annotations immediately using a more specific app called Shots. Shots is a simple but convenient tool to enable you save more times in creating an annotated screenshot. This tool is build with Electron and is available for all major operating systems including Linux, Windows and Mac. Shots is simple, minimal, and task-focused.

Shots doesn’t allow you to pick a specific part of your desktop. Something like other screen capturer tools may can do. But, you can crop your screenshot in order to strengthen your purpose.

You can add an arrow sign, give some texts, or blurring a specific part over your image. This article will show you how to use Shots in Ubuntu. And it should be same on Windows and Mac.

Installation

You can get the .DEB package of Shots from its GitHub page. (Windows and Mac users can also go to the same page). Type the following command to install the package.

sudo su dpkg -i shots_1.1.0_amd64.deb

Be sure to execute the command above from the directory where the .DEB package of Shots is located.

Getting started

• Go to the Unity dash (if you use Unity Desktop) and search for “Shots”. Open the app. You should see the Shots icon at the system tray.

• Click on the icon and select New. Your screenshot will be presented, and here you go. You can start doing what you want, starting from adding an arrow sign, cropping the specific area, typing some annotations and many more.

• By default, your annotated screenshot will be stored to the Shots server at theshots.ru. If you want your work to be stored to your local machine, go to Edit –> Settings and apply the custom changes. Choose Local. From here you can also set the global color of Shots.