GNOME Screenshot can't copy to clipboard in Ubuntu 18.04

I just freshly installed Ubuntu 18.04 and downloaded the latest updates. I'm having trouble taking screenshots to clipboard using the built-in gnome-screenshot tool. The default keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+PrintScreen and Ctrl+Shift+PrintScreen don't appear to work (makes the shutter sound, but empty clipboard and nothing saved in Pictures folder either), and using gnome-screenshot -c in the terminal is similarly ineffective.

I've read that gnome-screenshot had clipboard issues with Wayland, but my understanding is that 18.04 defaults to Xorg. Checking my login settings, the default is "Ubuntu," with a secondary "Ubuntu on Wayland" option. I'm just using the default.

Solution 1:

Not sure if this is related - in my case (fresh Ubuntu 19.10), gnome-screenshot -c would put the captured image to the clipboard, but somehow I can only paste it in certain applications (e.g. Gimp) while not in others (e.g. Chrome).

Found a workaround by (assigning to a shortcut) this:

gnome-screenshot -acf /tmp/test && cat /tmp/test | xclip -i -selection clipboard -target image/png

Solution 2:

Had the same problem in Ubuntu 20.04: gnome-screenshot -a -c was not copying to clipboard.

Solution was to ensure xclip was installed with sudo apt install xclip.

• gnome-screenshot version = 3.36.0
• xclip version = 0.13-1

Solution 3:

Today I had a similar problem under Oracle Linux 8: It wouldn't copy to the clipboard. I could resolve this with running the command:

env GDK_BACKEND=x11 gnome-screenshot -i

Note the x, it is not capital X as usual!

You may enter -c instead of -i, of course. On this Oracle Linux 8 machine other applications couldn't create a window at all without the GDK_BACKEND setting.