Skip to main content
otter-shot frames a window screenshot with a gradient background, drop shadow, rounded corners, and padding. You can add synthetic window chrome if you want. Capture a live window, a hand-drawn region, or the full desktop, then export PNG through the portal save picker or to the clipboard.

Launching

Run otter-shot from the app launcher or a terminal. The composer window opens immediately. No arguments required.
It ships a .desktop file, so it shows up in the app launcher. Bind it to a compositor shortcut if you use it often.
otter-shot appears in your application launcher through its installed .desktop entry. No manual PATH setup needed.

Capture sources

Focused Window

Captures the currently focused window when you click the source button. No selection step.

Selected Window

Opens a live list of all toplevels reported by the compositor. Click a row to capture that window.

All Screens

Captures the full desktop across every connected output in one frame.

Dragged Selection

Same drag-to-select UI as otter-screenshot and otter-rec. Drag to define a rectangular region.
If your compositor exposes ext_foreign_toplevel_list_v1 metadata but not the full capture protocol, the window list still appears in the inspector. Those rows are marked metadata-only instead of failing silently when you try to capture them.

Composer controls

After capture, the right-hand inspector panel controls the framing. Scroll the inspector if the controls exceed the visible height.
  • Source re-captures using any of the four source modes without closing the composer.
  • Background uses gradient swatches from the current capture first, then preset gradients, a portal-picked wallpaper, or your live otter-wallpaper state. Click the wallpaper field to open the file picker.
  • Frame adjusts padding around the captured content, corner radius, drop shadow intensity and offset, and border color.
  • Options toggles synthetic window chrome to add a mock title bar or control buttons.
  • Size sets the output canvas dimensions. Controls update the preview in real time.
  • Export saves to a file or copies to clipboard (see Exporting below).

Annotation and OCR

After capture, click Annotate above the preview. That opens the same vector tools as otter-screenshot --annotate: arrows, spotlight, lines, strokes, shapes, markers, redaction, text, colors, fill, and undo/redo. Hover a toolbar icon for its name and shortcut. Done returns you to product-shot composition. Export flattens the annotations before scaling. Whole-image OCR copies recognized text to the clipboard. It uses the system tesseract CLI. Packaged installs depend on tesseract-ocr. If tesseract is missing, the GUI disables OCR.

Exporting

Two export paths once the composition looks right.
1

Export PNG to file

Click Export PNG in the inspector. The xdg-desktop-portal save picker opens so you can choose a filename and destination directory. otter-shot writes the framed PNG only after you confirm the picker.
2

Copy to clipboard

Click Clipboard to copy the framed PNG as image/png. Paste it into any application that accepts image data.

Compositor requirements

otter-shot requires the ext_image_copy_capture_v1 protocol for all capture operations. Screen and dragged-selection capture also require output capture source support from the compositor. Window capture requires both ext_image_copy_capture_v1 and ext_foreign_toplevel_list_v1. If your compositor does not expose these protocols, the affected capture sources will be unavailable.