The screenshots.debian.net site is a public repository of screenshots taken from applications contained in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and its derivates like Ubuntu.

It was created by Cristoph Haas to help people get an impression of what a certain software will look like on your desktop before you install it. Everybody can take screenshots and upload them through the upload form. So far there are about 3100 screenshots, which is actually a small number if you consider Debian Squeeze contains about 15000 source packages

After I hacked a bit on KSnapshot, the KDE snapshot tool, Sune asked me to add an export to screnshots.debian.net command. I had not thought of it before but that looked like a great idea, it would make the process or taking-screenshot, visit-upload-form, upload-each-screen so much easier!. So I started to develop my first KIPI plugin.

Here is the resulting Debian Screenshots plugin, as you would use it in KSnapshot:

Being a KIPI plugin, it is available not only from KSnapshot but also from Digikam, Gwenview and the other applications which support KIPI plugins:

Which makes me think: what about having a debshots (the software powering screenshots.debian.net) installation over at kde.org and have screenshots for all the KDE applications? What do you think? Promo team? Sysadmins? Setting it up shouldn’t be difficult: I’m no Python or Pylons expert (I’m more of a Ruby and Wt C++ guy πŸ™‚ and got it running in a VM in an afternoon, even solving some SQLAlchemy 0.6 issues.

11 Thoughts on “KIPI plugin for screenshots.debian.net

  1. Tomaz Canabrava on Friday 03rd December 2010 at 22:43:59 said:

    Can you put the ‘export to’ as a side-menu? it’s really big now, and will tend to grow as more services will be added, in a small screen as a netbook, this is terrible πŸ˜‰

  2. I just got the latest updates to KSnapshot and automatically sending a screenshot via email will be very useful to report bugs on bug tracking systems that support automatic bug reporting via email.

    Btw, as the list of KIPI Plugins grows, is there some place to manage them? I will never export to iPod for instance, and would rather not see the option in all menus.

  3. @Tomaz, Jacob:
    Rather than adding a “export to” side menu, I’d like to have a “Plugins” control module in System Settings to enable/disable which module will be shown. As Jacob says, there are modules I will never use.

  4. Please change it to Debian/Ubuntu screenshots to make it clear, since we support both Debian and Ubuntu.

  5. Also, at some point there will be a language option in the form, I hope you will be able to add that to the plugins you made.

  6. @Paul:
    When a language option is supported in s.d.n, I will add it to the plugin.

    As for Debian/Ubuntu, what is your proposal? “Export to Debian/Ubuntu Screenshots…”? or maybe display “Export to Debian Screenshots…” on Debian systems, “Export to Ubuntu Screenshots…” on Ubuntu? I’m not particularly happy with either option, and after all, the name of the site is screenshots.debian.net πŸ˜•

  7. I think “Export to Debian/Ubuntu Screenshots…”.

    The site is accessible as both screenshots.debian.net and screenshots.ubuntu.com.

  8. Hi,

    I was just thinking about writing a kipi-plugin for imagebin.ca. Since these two services are very simillar, what do you think about merging these two plugins in one? πŸ™‚ I’d take care of the imagebin.ca backend. If you’re interested, please let me know, also I can be found on Freenode IRC at #kde as mck182.

    Looking forward to hear from you! πŸ™‚

    Marty

  9. @Martin Klapetek:
    Actually imagebin.ca is more different than it seems from screenshots.debian.net:
    – No completion, thus no HTTP/JSON required
    – It requires keeping track of the response from the server to report back to the user the URL the image is available from

    The main thing in common is the multipart/form-data upload method + HTTP post (take a look at mpform.{h,cpp} and KIO::http_post or QNetworkAccessManager::post)

    I’d say it’d be easier to maintain an imagebin.ca plugin in its own.

  10. Martin Klapetek on Thursday 16th December 2010 at 16:30:55 said:

    Ahh ok, I’ll start working on a new plugin then…thanks for the reply πŸ˜‰

    Marty

  11. thank you very match blog

Leave a Reply to Paul Wise Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

 

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Post Navigation