GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 672759
taking a screenshot turns the whole screen white
Last modified: 2015-11-15 21:32:42 UTC
When I take a screenshot, the whole screen turns white like a flash for a second. This is annoying and interrupts the workflow, especially if you want to take many screenshots. It also causes worries what will actually be visible at the final screenshot image. Since taking a screenshot is a very serious matter about the current display (even pixels can be important for a user), the screenshot tool should not alter the display with any effects. This happens on Ubuntu 12.04/Unity 3d. There seems not to be any bug tracker on launchpad that is more relevant for this issue.
The flash *won't* be visible in the screenshot image, and gnome-screenshot takes extra care to avoid this. It's also useful as a nice hint of what happens, together with the camera shutter sound. Under GNOME Shell, the flash is even drawn by the compositor directly, so its animation is usually very smooth - this might not be the case under Unity, since when GNOME Shell is not detected, gnome-screenshot falls back to use the old X11 methods for this. As this is by design, I'm closing it as NOTABUG.
Hi, then the fallback is something like a bug. It *does* take 10 seconds to display a this white window (without transparency). Even without rating this design decision, it has a high impact on my workflow. Within these ten seconds, I could have continued switching to another application or I could have done 3 more screenshots (especially this is ennoying if you need to take a lot of screenshots, with very precise timing). I'm sure for most people a slow solid white box has less similarity with a flash than a flash that's so fast that it's barely visible. If only under Gnome Shell a compositor is used, then one could maybe evaluate what is the best fallback that keeps work efficiency. In addition to this 10-second window, there appears also the save dialog (could also be a "failed" message) that gives a hint about the success of the screenshot.
Sometimes, the almost opaque white overlay will cover the screen for *several minutes* before the "save screenshot" dialog appears. This doesn't happen always, most of the time the effect works as intended, but you never know when it's going to hit this issue and lock your computer for a few minutes. I am using gnome-screenshot on Ubuntu 14.04 with Unity. This effect is clearly not working as intended on all machines, so it would be very important to have the option to turn it completely off. There's no need to add anything to the gnome-screenshot GUI, just having the setting in a configuration file or as a command line option would be perfectly fine, but please make it possible to turn the effect off on such machines where it causes trouble.