Screenshot area is greyed out

[Tom Slominski]

Hi. I've got a funny issue here that I cannot quite describe. Sometimes, when I want to take a screenshot (using the built in screenshot tool or an external screenshot tool like Screen Cloud) the screen just blanks out.

gnome-screenshot produces a fully grey image (will attach). I expect it to take a full screen image of my desktop.

Using the "select area and screenshot" tool of Screen Cloud used to grey out the entire screen and only show the shadow of the notification bar, but I've since reinstalled Ubuntu and now it greys out everything apart from the notification bar and the dock at the side. I will attach a photo of this, since I obviously cannot take a screenshot of this behaviour. Interestingly, the first time it happened on this new installation of Ubuntu, it blanked out most of what I described above apart from about half an inch from the bottom of the screen, just enough to show a part of the Chrome downloads bar.

This happens seemingly at random, and then stays like this until I reboot. As I said, this happened across two installations (12.04 upgraded to 12.10 and later to 13.04 and a fresh 13.04 installation), so this is likely a problem with my hardware. I will attach appropriate information momentarily.

gnome-screenshot:
  Installed: 3.6.1-0ubuntu2
  Candidate: 3.6.1-0ubuntu2
  Version table:
 *** 3.6.1-0ubuntu2 0
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ raring/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Also, in an attempt to fix this I've asked about on Ubuntu Forums about this error. ibjsb4 suggested reinstalling gnome-screenshot or using Shutter, but neither of these suggestions helped. He also suggested running gnome-screenshot from terminal, but that just takes a grey screenshot as normal and doesn't output anything in the terminal.
---
ApportVersion: 2.9.2-0ubuntu8.1
Architecture: amd64
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.04
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-06-09 (15 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" - Release amd64 (20130424)
MarkForUpload: True
Package: gnome-screenshot 3.6.1-0ubuntu2
PackageArchitecture: amd64
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.8.0-25.37-generic 3.8.13
Tags: raring
Uname: Linux 3.8.0-25-generic x86_64
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
UserGroups: adm cdrom dip lpadmin plugdev sambashare sudo vboxusers

[Tom Slominski (tomslominski)]

apport information

[Tom Slominski (tomslominski)]

apport information

[infected (infected)]

Having the same issue with Shutter and the Chrome Addon Bildschirmerfassung when selecting an area screenshot

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[C Heslop (heslop-chris)]

Just wanted to add to this. I'm getting completely white screenshots. It appears that on slower computers, ubuntu takes a screenshot of the flash effect instead of what's there before the effect.

[Tom Slominski (tomslominski)]

C Heslop, it's probably a separate issue.

[Tom Slominski (tomslominski)]

Also, right now I tried to take a screenshots and I get the same symptoms as I first described but now I'm getting a pitch black screen, rather than a grey one.

[Aridani Medina Jorge (6dragon6)]

 I got the same problem, even with Shutter, the only way I found to be able to fix it is to reset Unity:
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/04/how-to-reset-unity-compiz-in-ubuntu-12-10-and-13-04

 Easy to do, but not suitable for everyone I guess.

[VanSteve (fitzssteve)]

Having the same grey-image problem with gnome-screenshot and with Shutter (using both the Selection and "Desktop" full screen settings)

[xdom (dominik-h)]

I am having the same issue running Ubuntu Gnome. Also figured out what the reason is - Dash to dock extension in my case; gnome-screenshot only takes a shot of the dock.
However, Scrot works normally.

[Carl Pelz (pelzc)]

I have the same problem on Ubuntu 14.04. It happens with "screenshot", "PrntScr" key, or "gnome-screenshot" from terminal. Screen shot used to work for me.

To recover from the "WHITE SCREEN": switch to terminal (Ctrl + Alt + F1) and kill the "gnome-screenshot" process, then switch back to desktop (Ctrl + Alt + F7).

I believe the problem is due to permissions on the file ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel in the user's home folder. In my case, this file was owned by root. I assume this happened due to doing a printscreen as sudoer, but I'm not how exactly this happened in my case.

Once I changed the owner and group back to my user, all the above methods of screenshot work again without causing a white screen. (sudo chown user:user ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel)

Hope this helps!

[Daira Hopwood (daira)]

Same symptoms for me, but ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel had correct ownership and permissions. scrot works. I'm using LMDE.

[Lubo Gocnik (goco)]

Guys I found fix for that grayed area.
You only need to close gnome-screenshot on your application panel.