Snapshot For Linux

Snapshot is the second app to be "accepted" in the very exciting GNOME Incubator program, and is now available on Flathub (meaning everyone can give it a try).

For those who are not familiar with the Incubator, it's a group of projects that are set to be part of the GNOME Core and GNOME Development tools, in short, it means that they might actually replace some of the current set of apps.

The main idea behind Snapshot is to hopefully someday replace Cheese, the current webcam utility for GNOME users.

The app boasts a more modern look and feel, and to be completely honest, it looks a lot more like the camera apps we have in our non-Linux mobile devices. Snapshot is written in Rust, which means that it's super lightweight. It's also designed with both laptops/desktops, and mobile devices in mind.

Seeing that it is meant to (potentially) replace Cheese (sometime in the future), it's only natural to ask about features. Straight off the bat, we have to say that Snapshot is still not at Cheese's level, at least when it comes to features.

While Cheese has various special effects/filters, built-in "flash," and it allows you to control various parameters such as brightness, contrast, saturation, and both video and photo resolution, Snapshot feels more like an app that would do all these things for you.

However, at the current time, Snapshot is still not what one might call a complete webcam utility. You get a countdown timer, you get a nice little gallery view, the ability to turn the shutter sound on or off, and well, that's about it. It doesn't even (yet) have an option for setting the reflection mode.

The most important thing to keep in mind here is that Snapshot will most likely evolve over the following months. Our hope is that it will evolve into a valid replacement for Cheese which, of course, means the addition of more useful features.

As it stands, it's a sleek-looking app that shows potential, so you might as well give it a try if you're curious.