Ubuntu – Picture/Video capture programs

software-recommendationwebcam

What software options are there for taking videos and or pictures within Ubuntu (Much like Apple's Photobooth)?

Please limit one software solution per answer and include key features/description of the software

Best Answer

cheese

Cheese uses your webcam to take photos and videos, applies fancy special effects and lets you share the fun with others.

Cheese uses GStreamer to apply fancy effects to photos and videos. With Cheese it is easy to take photos of you, your friends, pets or whatever you want and share them with others. After the success of the Summer of Code, the development continued and we still are looking for people with nice ideas and patches ;)

alt text

Tesseract OCR

The original engine was developed back in the late 80's by HP and IBM but it has proven to be one of the best Ocular Recognition Softwares I've used. It's recently undergone many updates to the engine and has become one of the most comprehensive OCR tools on the market. Outscoring against most all other OCR tools (with something in the higher 90 percentile of text matches) it can easily transform standard document type-face to text.

The following is an example:

tesseract ScannedDocument.png out

Will produce a file called out.txt

Ubuntu – What kinds of desktop environments and shells are available

GNOME Shell

GNOME Shell Application Overview
^{GNOME Shell's Application Overview on Ubuntu GNOME 16.04LTS with GNOME 3.18}

GNOME Shell is the "official" shell developed for GNOME 3 by the GNOME project. It is the default interface used by the officially-supported Ubuntu GNOME flavor, and is the default interface for the main Ubuntu flavor since 17.10 instead of Unity.

Features

Uses Mutter instead of Compiz for the window manager.
The Activities Overview provides an easy way to view all your open windows, drag windows between workspaces, search for applications, and more.
The Notifications system is designed to help you quickly respond to notifications in place or to return to them at a convenient time.
Extensions is a powerful feature that enables you to extend the functionality and interface of GNOME Shell. Have a look at GNOME Shell Extensions website to see the available ones. For more information on how to install these extensions, see the answers to this question.
By default, windows cannot be minimized in GNOME Shell, as the use of Activities Overview and Workspaces are supposed to replace that. This could need some getting used to at first. Or alternatively, you can use the GNOME Tweak Tool to enable the minimize window button.
GNOME Shell uses automatic workspace management; at any given moment, it only keeps open as many workspaces as you have active windows on, plus an extra empty one to start more windows. When you remove all the windows from a workspace, that workspace will be removed until you need it again. Alternatively, you can use the GNOME Tweak Tool to set a static number of workspaces.

System Requirements

GNOME Shell requires hardware acceleration, and has roughly similar requirements to Unity. As of the time that this was written, the GNOME developers aim to have GNOME Shell able to run on any hardware that is at most four to five years old.

How To Get It?

Before 17.10, Ubuntu GNOME was an Ubuntu flavour that had a full blown GNOME desktop environment installed and used by default. This is the recommended method to get GNOME Shell installed in Ubuntu, if you don't plan to use Unity, KDE or any other desktop environment. With 17.10 onwards, the default Ubuntu installation uses GNOME Shell with an Ubuntu theme and dock. A vanilla GNOME Shell can be installed using the vanilla-gnome-desktop package.

GNOME Shell is available in the official Ubuntu repositories. To install it on an existing install, click here:

Or run this in Terminal:

sudo apt install gnome-shell

Or if you prefer the GUI way, search for "gnome shell" in GNOME Software (or Ubuntu Software Center in older Ubuntu versions) and install the gnome-shell package. More instructions on how to install it can be found here. (The complete package including settings, etc, is found in the package ubuntu-gnome-desktop).