Bug 498716

Summary:	[Feature Enhancement] Expose --edit-existing "Open and edit existing screenshot file" option in GUI
Product:	[Applications] Spectacle	Reporter:	DeKay <darrylkacher>
Component:	General	Assignee:	Noah Davis <noahadvs>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	amarnathgorre, kde
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	24.12.1
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Other
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:
Attachments:	Attachment showing the annotate feature in Gwenview

Description DeKay 2025-01-16 02:46:49 UTC

Spectacle's built-in image annotation feature that allows the user to add arrows, shapes, text, etc to a screenshot is a wonderful feature.  Other KDE applications like Gwenview don't have such simple to use tools for use on existing images.  Other apps like Krita that might let you do this kind of thing have a much steeper learning curve than Spectacle.

However, hidden away in Spectacle's command line options is "--edit-existing" that allows a user to "Open and edit existing screenshot file". This is an amazing feature, but almost nobody knows about it because it is only mentioned in the man page and not exposed in the GUI.

This feature request is to expose an Import / Drag & Drop capability in Spectacle's GUI to let users annotate existing images with the tools Spectacle already provides. This should be relatively straightforward to implement given that most of the capability is already there behind a command line option. In my opinion it would be super useful and fill a bit of a void in KDE's current suite of applications: easy to use image annotation on existing files.

SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Spectacle 24-12-1

Comment 1 amarnath 2025-01-16 06:34:22 UTC

Created attachment 177393 [details]
Attachment showing the annotate feature in Gwenview

Annotate feature already exists in the Gwenview. Click show editing tools, then you can select annotate button to show annotate window.

Comment 2 Noah Davis 2025-01-16 16:05:22 UTC


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 471387 ***

Comment 3 Noah Davis 2025-01-16 16:06:40 UTC

It seems there's more interest than I thought there would be. Marked as a duplicate of another report.

Comment 4 DeKay 2025-01-16 18:48:38 UTC

Thank you for pointing out that annotation is now available in Gwenview! Somehow I missed that. I guess I was looking for something more obvious: all the rest of the Image operations operate on the image as a whole. The annotation options work only on a part of it.

Still, it would be really nice to see this capability in Spectacle as well. Spectacle's GUI is much nicer (for whatever reason in Arch, the icons representing the annotation operations are HUGE) and people will be used to working within Spectacle for annotations. I also found Gwenview's implementation seems buggy: if you move the toolbars around for example, the annotion options stop working. Changing the obsfuscation factor in blur doesn't seem to do anything, etc. But I guess that is an issue for another bug report.