pyscreenshot 0.6

python screenshot

The pyscreenshot module can be used to copy the contents of the screen to a PIL or Pillow image memory using various back-ends. Replacement for the ImageGrab Module, which works on Windows only, so Windows users don’t need this library. For handling image memory (e.g. saving to file, converting,..) please read PIL or Pillow documentation.

Links:

• home: https://github.com/ponty/pyscreenshot

• documentation: http://pyscreenshot.readthedocs.org

• PYPI: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyscreenshot

Goal:

Pyscreenshot tries to allow to take screenshots without installing 3rd party libraries. It is cross-platform but useful for Linux based distributions. It is only a pure Python wrapper, a thin layer over existing back-ends. Its strategy should work on most Linux distributions: a lot of back-ends are wrapped, if at least one exists then it works, if not then one back-end should be installed.

Features:

• Cross-platform wrapper

• Capturing the whole desktop

• Capturing an area

• saving to PIL or Pillow image memory

• some back-ends are based on this discussion: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/69645/take-a-screenshot-via-a-python-script-linux

• pure Python library

• supported Python versions: 2.7, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8

• It has wrappers for various back-ends:

  • scrot

  • ImageMagick

  • PyGTK

  • PIL or Pillow (only on Windows)

  • PyQt4

  • PyQt5

  • PySide

  • wxPython

  • Quartz (Mac)

  • screencapture (Mac)

  • gnome-screenshot

• time taken: 0.1s - 2.0s

• Performance is not a target for this library, but you can benchmark the back-ends and choose the fastest one.

• Interactivity is not supported.

• Mouse pointer is not visible.

Known problems:

• ImageMagick creates blackbox on some systems

• gnome-screenshot back-end does not check $DISPLAY -> not working with Xvfb

Similar projects:

• http://sourceforge.net/projects/gtkshots/

• http://pypi.python.org/pypi/autopy

• https://github.com/asweigart/pyscreeze

Examples

grab and show the whole screen:

#-- include('examples/showgrabfullscreen.py') --#
import pyscreenshot as ImageGrab

if __name__ == '__main__':

    # grab fullscreen
    im = ImageGrab.grab()

    # save image file
    im.save('screenshot.png')

    # show image in a window
    im.show()
#-#

to start the example:

python -m pyscreenshot.examples.showgrabfullscreen

grab and show the part of the screen:

#-- include('examples/showgrabbox.py')--#
import pyscreenshot as ImageGrab

if __name__ == '__main__':
    # part of the screen
    im = ImageGrab.grab(bbox=(10, 10, 510, 510))  # X1,Y1,X2,Y2
    im.show()
#-#

to start the example:

python -m pyscreenshot.examples.showgrabbox

Installation

• install pip

• install Pillow (Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install python-pil)

• install at least one back-end

• install the program:

  pip install pyscreenshot

Uninstall:

pip uninstall pyscreenshot

Command line interface

Back-end performance:

The performance can be checked with pyscreenshot.check.speedtest.

Example:

#-- sh('python -m pyscreenshot.check.speedtest --virtual-display 2>/dev/null') --#

n=10
------------------------------------------------------
wx                    3.4  sec        (  343 ms per call)
pygtk                 5.6  sec        (  558 ms per call)
pygdk3                2.8  sec        (  275 ms per call)
pyqt                  5.7  sec        (  565 ms per call)
pyqt5                 5.3  sec        (  527 ms per call)
scrot                 4.8  sec        (  481 ms per call)
imagemagick           7.5  sec        (  750 ms per call)
pyside                5.6  sec        (  558 ms per call)
gnome-screenshot      13   sec        ( 1278 ms per call)
#-#

Print versions:

#-- sh('python -m pyscreenshot.check.versions 2> /dev/null ')--#
python               2.7.15rc1
pyscreenshot         0.4.2
wx                   3.0.2.0
pygtk                2.28.6
pygdk3               3.26.1
pyqt                 4.12.1
pyqt5                5.10.1
scrot                0.8
imagemagick          6.9.7
pyside               1.2.2
gnome-screenshot     3.25.0
#-#

Wayland

On Wayland only the gnome-screenshot back-end works:

im = ImageGrab.grab(backend='gnome-screenshot')