How can I disable the shutter sound of gnome-screenshot?

Question

After a recent update of my LMDE, the gnome-screenshot tool started making an annoying camera shutter noise every time a screenshot is taken. This is both annoying and startling (especially if you happen to be wearing earphones when taking the screenshot).

I checked the man page of gnome-screenshot` but there were no relevant options. How can I take silent screenshots?

Answer 1

I found the solution here. The sound played is /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/camera-shutter.oga. So simply renaming that file stops it from being played:

sudo mv /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/camera-shutter.oga \
    /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/damn-camera-shutter.oga

That's it, next time you take a screenshot, it will be done in silence.

Answer 2

The other solution¹ has some inconveniences:
- it requires root access
- it's a global change so it affects all users
- upgrading sound-theme-freedesktop restores the file

For the record, the proper way to do it (and avoid all of the above) is via a custom sound theme that disables² the default sound file used by gnome-screenshot (the name of the file is screen-capture.oga corresponding to the screen-capture event - hardcoded in gnome-settings-daemon and gnome-screenshot).
Create the custom theme directory:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/sounds/__custom

create the .disabled file:

touch ~/.local/share/sounds/__custom/screen-capture.disabled

add the index.theme:

cat << 'EOF' > ~/.local/share/sounds/__custom/index.theme
[Sound Theme]
Name=__custom
Inherits=freedesktop
Directories=.
EOF

set __custom as default theme name:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.sound theme-name '__custom'

Or, if you're using Cinnamon:

gsettings set org.cinnamon.desktop.sound theme-name '__custom'

and enjoy the silence...

---

^{1: Yeah, I know it's actually my solution but at the time of posting it on the arch forums I was just being lazy...}

^{2: A pseudo file format ".disabled" is used for disabling sounds in a theme that inherits from another theme. If the sound lookup algorithms detects a file with the suffix ".disabled" it shall immediately terminate the lookup logic and consider the sound not available. All files with ".disabled" suffix should be of length zero.}

Answer 3

Renaming the shutter sound file is OK, but probably won't work if you don't have root access to the system. Here's an alternative approach:

#!/bin/bash
volume=$(amixer sget Master | awk -F '[],[,%]'  '/%/{print $2 }')
amixer sset Master 0
gnome-screenshot
amixer sset Master "$volume"%

What this script does is remember volume percentage, set volume temporarily to 0, take screenshot, and once gnome-screenshot process exits, the volume is restored back to original percentage.

The advantage of this approach is that it is flexible and can be customized to suit your needs. This script can be bound to PrntScr button, or to custom shortcut.

Tested on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Answer 4

When using Gnome tools, the best might be to use Gnome settings with it. Muting "system sounds" in sound settings makes it quiet, and it is not global, and from gnome-44 onwards also selecting a "none" for the sound theme has the same effect: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/6376

or, from https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/udjdi9/remove_screenshot_capture_sound/:

In gnome-control-center under sounds, switch to any alarm sound other than the current one, and switch back. This will ensure the directory structure and files needed for the next step are created. Then run:

touch ~/.local/share/sounds/__custom/screen-capture.disabled
touch ~/.local/share/sounds/

Answer 5

Same code as above but with a slight change to work in ubuntu (adding the -D pulse to select the device, and removing the speech marks on the volume variable. This works for me on Ubuntu 20.04 (create a file in your home dir, make it executable, create a keyboard shortcut in gnome settings to run the script)

#!/bin/bash
volume=$(amixer -D pulse sget Master | awk -F '[],[,%]'  '/%/{print $2 }')
amixer -D pulse sset Master 0
gnome-screenshot
amixer -D pulse sset Master $volume%